Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

discussions.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 311 posts

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#241

Post by jlarocco »

bluedino wrote: post #172

There isn't anything wrong here. One of the confusing issues is that people say, "I'm only using 15% of my CPU, the fans should not be coming on." What they don't realize, is that using 1 core running at turbo speeds is only going to show up as 15% of the CPU, but draw enough power and create enough heat to trigger the fans! Another thing that some of these posters are not aware of, is that running these temperature/…

Your reply comes off a little condescending. You don't know the technical ability of the people posting in the forum, or what they realize or not.

It doesn't take any special qualifications for a person to hear the the fan turning on more often on their new MBP than with their old MBP running the same work loads.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#242

Post by gmurphy »

FWIW, disabling Intel Turbo Boost (using Turbo Boost Switcher) has solved all my 16" MBP fan noise issues with no noticable performance impact for my daily tasks - you can even disable it in Bootcamp Windows (by setting CPU to 99% in power settings) and still get good framerates in Destiny 2.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#243

Post by S_A_P »

pram wrote: post #218
S_A_P wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you are saying up until you say nothing is wrong with the fan coming on at a 15% cpu load. regardless of what is really happening to take that 15% load, if the fan comes on that strong, it is not a proper thermal design. As a contrast, I have an 8 core iMac Pro. It can run full throttle and I rarely if ever hear the fan and it is much quieter than my 2018 6 core macbook pro. Of course a 27" home cha…

15% load can mean a single i9 core boosting to 4.8-5ghz. The OP is correct. When I use a single threaded program that is keeping a core pinned at 100% why would it be unreasonable for the fan to be on?

I dont care if the fan is on. I care that the fan is egregiously on. It is probably 95-100db on. That means that the macbook is fundamentally unable to manage the heat load it generates. It would be one thing if I were in the middle of the desert outside at 100degreeF conditions. But I was indoors and the ambient temperature was probably 68F. Again, I dont care if the fan runs, I just dont want to hear it, and I dont want the fan to be loud enough that everyone worries that my laptop is going to "catch fire", "Take off", "heat the room", and a half dozen other comments that were made at a client site. I bought a macbook to have nice hardware that I dont have to worry about...

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#244

Post by vbezhenar »

stouset wrote: post #166
jacobcohen11 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how about a comparable laptop?

Yeah, no shit it’s cheaper to put a ton of high TDP components into a massive chassis with nearly limitless cooling. Powerful, portable, cheap. Pick two.

With apple you pick one.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#245

Post by chendragon »

baybal2 wrote: post #14

What can I say as a person somewhat close to electronics engineering: Look at that single skinny heat pipe, it will get saturated very fast. Second to that, look at those tiny radiators, they are clearly not capable to discharge the full heat flux. I simply don't see any signs of proper thermal engineering there. Apple says "we are listening now, and here is a new cooling design," then it comes out to be even less ad…

Modern Intel notebook processors like these are likely running close to 80W and 65 steady state - They've got up to 8 cores to do this. Measurements by Notebookcheck seem to suggest that the MacBook Pro is already doing fairly well compared to PC OEM solutions, especially given the size of the enclosure and the fact that unlike Asus in the Zephyrus, they're not using 12V server level 60dBa fans in a laptop.

Where I think the MacBook Pro could do better is if they adopted more of a vapor chamber strategy for the heatsink, but as you mentioned the radiators are probably going to be the limiting factor, seeing as there's really not a huge temperature delta going on here.

I suppose one strategy could be to perhaps up the fan speed yet again, maybe at the cost of a little bit more noise, and use heat sinks with fins as finely pitched as the MacBook Air. Of course this will make the heat sink more heavy and expensive, but given the robustness of old Thinkpads that did not go easy on the copper, it could work.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#246

Post by kevingadd »

tpmx wrote: post #182
sudhirj wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more related to 1440p specifically. People reporting no issues with higher resolutions.

I have a 2160p external monitor attached to my MBP 16" via Thunderbolt/Displayport 1.2 at 60 Hz. I tried out the five different "Looks like" scalings the Display Preferences allow for and then eyeballed the "Radeon High Side" wattage readouts via iStat Menus: 1280x720: 18W 1920x1080: 6W 2560x1440: 6W 3200x1800: 6W 3840x2160: 6W So it looks like it might (also?) be related to the display resolution scaling.

It would make sense if situations where the native panel resolution doesn't match the framebuffer resolution are causing the driver stack to have to maintain two framebuffers (native and non-native) to do the upscale and then feed it to the monitor. GeForce drivers on windows specifically have a setting to control whether this happens or not (let the monitor scale it, have the GPU scale it). The upscale would not only use more VRAM in that case (and as a result more memory bandwidth) but it'd need a bit more GPU compute as well to perform the scaling.

On my low-spec laptop from a while back, running Rising Thunder set to 720p was faster than native, but it was even faster to first set my desktop resolution to 720p because the overhead of the game engine scaling its 720p framebuffer up to native 4k was measurable. Setting the desktop resolution down also improved battery life.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#247

Post by kevingadd »

nottorp wrote: post #171
zarmin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bug on Macbooks in general, as I understand it. I have a 2019 MBP with a 4k monitor, and if I change the resolution to anything except the default, there is massive system-wide lag. God forbid I use PyCharm on 4k scaled resolution – a full second between typing and seeing the text.

That seems unrelated; I think Mac OS is the only place where non native resolutions use GPU-accelerated scaling. The other operating systems just set whatever resolution you asked for and let the monitor handle it. This seems to be excessive GPU use when simply connecting an external monitor at its native res.

NVIDIA drivers on Windows have an option to scale on the GPU instead of on the monitor, though I'm not certain whether they ever default that on. Presumably it's there as a workaround for people with bad/broken monitors. It'd be interesting to try and measure whether that option raises power draw...

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#248

Post by nigma »

ecliptik wrote: post #214
muyuu wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my 2015 MBP with an external 4K monitor every day and it works like a charm. No delay, no fans going off, etc.

Does it have two GPUs it switches between? One high perf and one integrated? When I had a MBP 2015 I rarely had the fan come because it only had and and used an integrated GPU. With a 2018 MBP the fan frequently kicks on because it switches to the Radeon high perf GPU when doing things like connecting to an external monitor.

The MBP 2015 with discrete GPU is hardwired to output video signal through AMD M370X. It can get quite noisy when just connected to an external display.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#249

Post by kevingadd »

behnamoh wrote: post #228
nottorp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems unrelated; I think Mac OS is the only place where non native resolutions use GPU-accelerated scaling. The other operating systems just set whatever resolution you asked for and let the monitor handle it. This seems to be excessive GPU use when simply connecting an external monitor at its native res.

Also, at least macOS provides a consistent resolution for windows, texts, etc. On Windows (after Win 8), many times old applications run with __blurred__ texts and icons while the new shiny Win apps have no such problem. It's actually one of the reasons I don't use Windows anymore, although it's been making good progress.

It's technically consistent, Windows just chooses to rasterize non-DPI-aware applications at the lowest common denominator DPI and scale them up on high-DPI monitors. AFAIK MacOS does the opposite, and rasterizes everything at the highest DPI and then scales down as necessary. The latter looks much better so I'm not totally sure why Windows doesn't do it - perhaps a compatibility hack for apps that expect classic 96dpi.

Newer versions of Win10 actually have an odd variant of this that works more like MacOS where it will sometimes rasterize at a higher DPI and scale down - it looks pretty nice but it's not compatible with all old applications, I only have it enabled for a couple.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#250

Post by jasonrhaas »

I have the Macbook Pro 16 and have been using it for a few months now. Overall, I think its pretty bad laptop for how expensive it is. Yes Apple fixed many things people were complaining about but it is a perfect example of how Apple has stopped innovating and stopped caring about the MacBook line. In fact, I dislike it so much I have started using my 10 year old MacBook Air instead of my brand new Macbook Pro.

Things I dislike about the MBP 16:

- Still has the touch bar

- Screen size is awful. I like to work with windows size by size and the 16 inch screen size is awkward because most website won't re-size properly.

- Its heavy as hell, slightly thinker than the old ones.

- Its slow. Yes, all the RAM and CPU and the thing is laggy. I don't know why but it just has a bad "feel" to it.

- Touchpad is too big. Its gigantic and I often end up touching it by accident.

- Its crazy expensive

In the end, I will end up selling it and using my 10 year old Macbook Air until it dies. After that I'm not sure.. maybe I will try the newer Macbook Air and see if its tolerable. At least it doesnt have a touchbar.

Post reply on HN