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MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

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Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#131

Post by washadjeffmad »

tedmiston wrote: post #72
kalleboo wrote: post #33

It's summer now and as soon as I plug my MacBook Pro 2017 in to charge, it starts throttling itself due to the heat of the charging battery. Same thing happened to the 2012 I had before. These things just don't have adequate cooling.

Do you have a way to monitor or measure the CPU throttling on macOS? I've found Intel Power Gadget [1] which looks like it might help, however, I'm not really sure what these graphs should look like when throttling vs not. [1]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget...

Look up the specs for the processor in your system, then chart the temps alongside per-core clocks.

On Intel chips with a 1 to 4 core boost, no cores will rise above the base clock when thermally throttled, voltage may increase, and frequencies will be lower. You can run a CPU bound benchmark until temps rise and note when the performance begins to decrease.

On desktop Intel processors, this usually happens between 70-80°C.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#132

Post by r00fus »

chx wrote: post #75

This madness is something Apple can only blame themselves for. It's Steve Jobs' ploy to kill the laptop market. He didn't need the laptop market, he had the iPhone, he knew of the iPad when he demo'd the Macbook Air. Today the entire Mac revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re... is below 10%. See, he have started the thin craze and everyone copied. But noone needs a thin laptop. There's…

I really doubt even Jobs thought his RDF extended to the entire laptop market.

He just had a great idea and Apple executed on it. The early MBA's (2010) were absolutely fantastic, quiet and reasonably powerful (read completely usable).

As an anecdote, new hires at my company are given either a somewhat heavy ThinkPad or MPB (higher end). Many have complained about the weight of the ThinkPad. None complain when they choose the MBP.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#133

Post by garren »

abakker wrote: post #51
shiburizu wrote: post #46

Genuinely curious: I don't work in the space of CAD, video editing or any other field that people tend to use to justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet. Do these really do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't? Plenty of options with latest gen Intel and Nvidia 10xx series are out there for less insane prices. Granted, I don't see many…

OSX really. Loss of productivity from the little stuff in windows just isn’t manageable for me. OS X has problems, but I’m used to it and familiar with it and it works as expected.

I agree with the loss of productivity in Windows. For me it started with Win7, really took hold with Win8/server 2012 "metro", and only got a little better in Win10.

I don't understand why there are two significantly different ways to do simple things like connect to a network or configure an existing connection. The OS throws the pretty/flat metro inspired applet at you, but it has 10% of the actual functionality you're looking for, so you end up popping open the control panel anyway. The start menu ads are an insane addition. The apps in the app store are pretty much pointless and anything you actually need you can install via chocolatey.

If MS were to produce an actual "pro" version of Windows that removed all of the fluffy inconsistent stuff, ripped out all vestiges of Win8, and put PowerShell front and center, it would appeal to a lot of people that just want to get stuff done.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#134

Post by ebikelaw »

shub wrote: post #124
ldh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all instructions (or instruction sets) are equivalent.

They're not that different, either. It's been a long time since high-performance cores were executing the instructions as fetched and not translating into µops. The stuff Intel does on their chips works on ARM too. People are doing it, and it's working[0]. That makes a hell of a lot more difference on throughput than what ISA is implemented. [0] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1316/a-look-at-caviums-new-hi...

Actually the x86 instruction format is key to Intel's performance dominance. It happens to be rather dense in terms of instruction per byte, and it turns out that instruction cache hit rate (and iTLB hit rate) are extremely important to high performance. Rather than the naive view that x86 is somehow saddled with its ancient and ugly instruction set, it's actually all of the RISC-like architectures that turn out to be hampered by their overly beautiful instructions.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#135

Post by zamalek »

wukerplank wrote: post #108
slantyyz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was starting to hate Apple products. If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the MBP.

In all fairness: If you sell a >3000€ laptop, people should expect to get the full value out of it. Maybe it's hard to cool CPUs in thin laptops. But then don't let people pay for expensive upgrades that have no performance benefit.

> But then don't let people pay for expensive upgrades that have no performance benefit.

The number of people who want performance stats, or at least think they need, far outnumber the amount of people who need performance. It makes absolute sense to sell these lemons, even though it is unethical.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#136

Post by agentdrtran »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #125
LyndsySimon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t think it’s unreasonable that a laptop should work in daylight?

A 15" laptop's body could easily be absorbing 75 watts of heat from the sun, equivalent to running both the CPU and GPU of a MacBook Pro pegged at 100%. I think throttling in this scenario is a reasonable tradeoff, much more so than overengineering the cooling solution to handle it and thereby increasing cost, weight and bulk. Sit in the shade.

"You're holding it wrong!"

Other laptops work in the sun.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#137

Post by Puer »

bri3d wrote: post #43
owenversteeg wrote: post #17

I keep seeing thermal issues come back to bite some of the smartest companies with products designed by the world's best engineers. Everything from batteries to laptops to phones is severely affected by heat, and improper thermal design can lead to some huge issues. For example, the biggest thing affecting battery life is thermal load. The biggest thing affecting the maximum sustained power of a laptop or phone is th…

Don't forget the infamous Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death, caused by incorrect thermal management causing balls on a BGA package to lift from the board underneath as it deflected.

Which is ironically also how you fixed it. I'll never forget the "magic" of wrapping my Xbox 360 in several towels and overheat for 30 minutes to supposedly resolder it back together. It worked for another 6 months after that until it completely and finally died.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#138

Post by abhorrence »

garren wrote: post #126
corey_moncure wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you taken the Surface Book 2 for a spin? Pricey, but gives the MBP a good run for its money, and does a couple tricks the MBP cannot, such as having an excellent touch/pen surface for a screen. Real ports, including SD card. The outstanding downside is, of course, the abominable Windows 10.

How often do you rely on the touch screen? I know it seems like a naive question, but I have an older surface pro and I rarely used the touch screen. The machine itself was bulkier than an iPad or Nexus9, so I tended to use those instead for tooling around and mindless consumption. The surface pro was pretty much useless for actual work unless I had a second monitor, actual keyboard, and trackpad. I do native Windows…

The surface pro seemed designed to be a tablet that could also be your computer. The surface book is a laptop that can also be a tablet. This difference is really important for interaction. That said I feel like the digitizer is only really useful for taking notes that contain diagrams, or things like digital art. I also barely use my surface book, despite thinking it's one of the best alternatives to my beloved 2015 15" MBP.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#139

Post by slantyyz »

mcphage wrote: post #123
lebrad wrote: post #19

Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. His argument is such a slam dunk that the article concludes with stunned disbelief, speculating that maybe there's "something wrong with the MacBook Pro with Core i9 chip that Lee received". Yes there's something wrong with it, that was the exact point of his video. Do people really think he just got a lemon?

> Do people really think he just got a lemon? Well, other sites have done benchmarks... have any of them reported it being slower than last year’s model?

Dave Lee's tests usually come from a gamer and media creator's perspective.

In most, if not all, of his reviews he makes a point to check thermals and throttling related to heat, because that matters to the gaming segment of his audience.

As for media creation, he always tests Adobe Premiere for his cross-platform media creation tests while acknowledging that Premiere on Mac is less performant than it is on Windows, and that there's a significant number of Mac media creators who prefer Final Cut.

The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. Running a CPU hot for short bursts can yield different comparative results than for a task that takes 30 minutes or more.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#140

Post by djsumdog »

slantyyz wrote: post #20
lebrad wrote: post #19

Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. His argument is such a slam dunk that the article concludes with stunned disbelief, speculating that maybe there's "something wrong with the MacBook Pro with Core i9 chip that Lee received". Yes there's something wrong with it, that was the exact point of his video. Do people really think he just got a lemon?

In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was starting to hate Apple products. If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the MBP.

I have a Dell XPS 15 (2017) and the thermals are really bad. I saw constant throttling in my kernel logs and the laptop sometimes slowed to a crawl when compiling, running a ton of docker containers, using Light Table or even just having a ton of browser tabs open.

I finally ditched it a few weeks ago, finally replacing it with a Ryzen 7 desktop.

I'll admit my XPS 15 was a factory refurbished model, so maybe I just got a lemon. It got so hot the battery is now swelling and it popped out the trackpad (I think there might be a recall; or if not take it in since that's gotta be under warranty).

My current laptop is a HP Spectre. It's thicker than the XPS, but I think it's got a much better cooling solution and preforms better. I don't think I'd recommend a Dell XPS again.

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