What is the status of the FAN NOISE problem on the MacBook Pro 16’’?

Last year I had to replace my MacBook Pro mid 2009 because my organization no longer allowed me to operate it on the network.  I decided to invest into a MacBook Pro 16’’.   Soon after I connected it to an external monitor the fans started running and making a loud noise.  I checked the CPU load and it was only a few percent.  Initially, I did not understand what was going on but soon realized that it has to do with the external monitor. When I unplugged it, the fans stopped making noise soon after and the MBP cooled down to almost room temperature. To get to the bottom of this, I installed iStats and monitored the power consumption. Without an external monitor, the MBP ran on about 10W. The CPU stayed around 40°C and the fans ran at ≈ 1600rpm. However, immediately after I plugged in an external monitor, the power consumption jumped up to 35W mainly due to the Radeon High Side using 18-20W.  It did not take long until the fans started running at high speed (3000rpm and higher and CPU at 70°C), making an annoying noise.  Even when the CPU load was below 3%!  That was shocking.   My old 2009 MBP did not have any problem driving an external monitor without fans running loud and here I had a new MBP for $3.300 making an annoying fan noise at essentially no load.  Searching the internet, it became soon clear that it was not just my problem. The culprit turned out to be the dGPU (AMD Radeon Pro 5500M).  The conclusion was that it has to be a poorly written, inefficient driver for the AMD dGPU because people running Windows on the same machine using bootcamp did not have this problem.  The expectation was that the problem will be fixed in one of the coming macOS updates. However, I recently installed the latest update (11.2.3) and the problem is still there.  Checking the internet, many MBP 16’’ owners report the same experience, i.e. no improvement after installing any update. Did anyone find a solution for this fan noise problem?  It seems that the Apple engineers need help.  


MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Mar 31, 2021 9:01 PM

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What is the status of the FAN NOISE problem on the MacBook Pro 16’’?

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