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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

#241

Post by marcelfahle »

wlll wrote: post #53
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.

In the summer I have to unplug one of my external monitors because my (maxed out) 2014 Macbook Pro gets too hot. I'm going to try using my linux desktop when it happens next, that at least has adequate cooling.

Same here. 2014 maxed out, doesn't do well in the spanish summer. External screen mostly stays disconnected, otherwise it throttles down after 30 mins.. Are there not some kind of cooling pads to help with this shit?

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

#242

Post by Kurtz79 »

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 had thermal issues both in my old Lenovo T61P and a more recent Macbook Pro 15, both with dedicated graphic cards.

No replacing of soldering paste on my part was ever able to improve the situation, with the result of having powerful machines only on paper, that were brought to their knees even by light workloads.

My Mac becomes impossibly hot and slows down playing games like Hearthstone and Civ5, FFS.

I have long decided that my next laptop (regardless of the brand) will have integrated graphics and a medium TDP CPU, and I will just limit heavy workloads and gaming to my desktop.

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

#243

Post by yourapostasy »

ianamartin wrote: post #3

You know, I'm so beat down by the state of apple laptops, I don't even care. I was all ready to spring for a new machine the day these dropped. Until I found out that they max the 13" model at 16 gigs of ram. I'm so pissed. I don't want the 15". That's what external monitors are for. I like the portable to be fucking portable. Jesus. I give up.

Who makes a 13" laptop with 32 GB RAM that is Thinkpad or the better models of Asus build quality? That much RAM in such a small form factor, regardless of thickness, also seems a hefty thermal challenge, but if someone out there is doing it, I'd like to take a look at them. I swung by the Lenovo and Dell sites, and only the Dell 14" will let you go up to 32 GB, but I've yet to see a 13" model.

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

#245

Post by kowdermeister »

m_fayer wrote: post #168
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thermal on my i7 xps13 is abysmal. Never again.

Same. It's hot, loud, and still never feels as fast as it should.

Loud? it's the quietest machine I ever had. No problems so far (9370 model)

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

#246

Post by lloeki »

Puer wrote: post #137
bri3d wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem was more precisely that thermal variations combined with the way the heatsink was attached and pushing on the middle of the CPU repeatedly warped the board due to thermal expansion, causing the balls to unseat. Heating the thing would help reseat the BGA thanks to thermal expansion but would certainly not reflow soldering (not enough heat).

The proper fix was to try to reseat the BGA by whatever means and change the way the heatsink was attached so that pressure on the BGA/board was even. I did that on two units and they survived for years after their first RRoD, and on a third unit right from the get go, and that one never suffered of any issue.

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

#247

Post by crispinb »

djsumdog wrote: post #140
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.

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 g…

I have the new 2018 9570 with an i9, and throttling is very modest. My workloads tend to be bursty rather than sustained, so I probably wouldn't notice in normal use anyway. But running the Intel XTU stress test, I only get very short periods of throttling.

Perhaps the 9570 is improved, or as many suggest Dells QC is poor and I got lucky.

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

#248

Post by tpaschalis »

meesterdude wrote: post #104

Well I guess my next machine has to be a PC running linux now. Been waiting to replace my aging MBP with this latest gen, but this is the the last straw for me. Charging such a premium and being too lazy (or thin-focused) that it can't meet it's base clock outside of a freezer is ridiculous. I just wish I could run OSX in a VM. Linux as a primary desktop isn't quite there yet.

You could run an OSX VM in either Windows or Linux (I'm doing fullscreen Linux VM on Windows with a Thinkpad, and it's quite good/fast). Idk if there are issues with licensing, though.

Also, give Linux as a primary desktop a try! What do you believe that's lacking, from your perspective?

Granted, it's not great out of the box, and some software isn't available, but if you have a couple of weekends to spare/invest with tinkering, you can have a pretty and solid desktop workstation setup.

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

#249

Post by crispinb »

pixelcloud wrote: post #38
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.

But does the i9 version have performance issues (i.e. it under performs compared to the i7)? The XPS 15 with the i9 configuration comes with 32GB ram and it much cheaper than an equivalent macbook pro. I can deal with it getting hot!

A couple of weeks into f/t use, mine (XPS 15" 9570, i9, 32GB RAM) doesn't get hot at all (fairly typical dev stuff - Docker, VMs, browsers, IntelliJ). It throttles intermittently, for short periods (perhaps 5% of the time) under a stress test.

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

#250

Post by tjoff »

paulmd wrote: post #206
aequitas wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When working as intern at an Apple store more than 10 years back the instructions from Apple for reassembly would always tell to put a huge amount of thermal grease on the CPU. So much that it would be squirted out from under the heatblock in large blobs. I always found it odd as I was used to add just as much as was needed without spilling over. Never read any research on it though so I'm curious what was the right…

If a bare-die CPU or GPU is not fully covered, the uncovered portions will rapidly become hot and the chip may die (especially if the thermal sensors are covered and cannot detect this). This is different from modern desktop processors where there is an IHS to help spread the heat around - there is a very real danger to insufficient paste application on a bare die. In contrast, since modern thermal pastes are non-con…

> since modern thermal pastes are non-conductive, there is no real downside to an enthusiastic application of paste except for making a mess, so you want to default to putting too much on rather than having some dumb intern kill a PC with an insufficient application. There is virtually no effect on thermals.

The effect on thermals are absolutely not insignificant. Thermal pastes are actually extremely bad at transferring heat and too much of it really has negative effects.

Yes, it is safer to put too much than too little. Using too much the worst case is just that the CPU throttles and performance is sluggish and that rarely leads to an RMA.

From https://www.ekwb.com/blog/thermal-compound-guide/

For example, the thermal conductivity of a high-grade thermal paste is 8.5 W/mK, and the heat conductivity of copper is 385 W/mK, or for aluminum 205 W/mK. You can see that the thermal compound is actually a poor heat conductor and that is exactly the reason why you only need a very thin layer of paste to fill the micro imperfections between the IHS and heatsink.

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