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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

#281

Post by andromeduck »

lvillani wrote: post #237
paulmd wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I recently re-applied thermal paste (an old Arctic MX-2 I had lying around) on a late 2013 MacBook Pro which has bare-die CPU and GPU. The first time I did it, I applied too much paste and it had an observable negative effect on thermal dissipation. Once I applied the correct am…

That's strongly mitigated by mounting pressure which is very high in macbooks.

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

#282

Post by imtringued »

andromeduck wrote: post #228
gaius wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the GPU generates heat as well. Which is why all the interest in external enclosures. This entire thread is baffling to me. Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??

Does the internal GPU generate enough heat to throttle under typical conditions? Having the option for external GPUs is a completely different story.

If it's the 13 inch model with an iGPU only then yes. The CPU and GPU will share their total TDP.

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

#283

Post by wtallis »

mrweasel wrote: post #276
some_account wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple can't make good keyboards anymore, are they even failing with their thermal paste now? I really don't feel these machines are professional level.

It's not just Apple, the thermal paste between the die and the heat spreader on newer Intel CPUs isn't getting good reviews either. Replacing the paste under the heat spreader is a lot more tricky though, and requires special tools. Why neither Apple nor Intel is opting for better thermal compound is amazing. Tests continue to CPU temperatures drop 10+ degrees (C) just by replacing the thermal compound. Even if they…

It may not hurt their margins much to use more expensive thermal compound, but it definitely won't help them in any meaningful way. These products are optimized for real-world bursty workloads that basically never hit a serious thermal limit that better paste could help with. Even on the desktop chips, delidding and replacing the thermal compound provides no benefit until you're pretty far into overclocking territory.

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

#284

Post by ben-schaaf »

bengale wrote: post #256
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?

It's impossible he had a faulty model?

Considering it ran fine with a lower ambient temperature, likely not...

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

#285

Post by wtallis »

gaius wrote: post #219
coldtea wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which "creative" workloads? Video, 3D, and photography mostly require sustained GPU. For audio, it's more the CPU.

I expect the GPU generates heat as well. Which is why all the interest in external enclosures. This entire thread is baffling to me. Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??

> Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??

Time scale is relevant. I want interactive tasks to be faster. I won't notice a 5% improvement in a job that takes long enough for a coffee break, but I will appreciate if more short tasks can cross the threshold of being indistinguishable from instantaneous.

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

#286

Post by glogla »

noir_lord wrote: post #274
wukerplank wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My ThinkPad T470P can run at 100% on a hot day, the CPU gets hot but it doesn't throttle down. Stockfish (chess engine) will batter a CPU like that.

Actually, it throttles as well, see notebookcheck review:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T470p-Core-i7-...

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

#287

Post by paulmd »

saas_co_de wrote: post #229
paulmd wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chip works fine. Apple used an insufficient cooling solution, Dell XPS laptops with a better cooling solution are doing fine.

The new chip has the exact same TDP rating as the old one. Unless Apple has made their thermal solution worse (highly unlikely) it is Intel that is fudging the TDP ratings.

The old chip pulled 33% less than its rated TDP in the real world.

Also, lol if you actually think TDP means anything anymore. Over the last 5 years it's become a marketing number more than anything else. It gives you a vague category of what power consumption will look like... at base clocks, under a non-AVX workload. Modern processors will happily blast past their TDP by 50-100% if there is thermal headroom available.

(And that's where laptops come up short - they can't actually cool a steady-state load, so these laptops will happily turbo themselves into a wall, and then once the heatsink is saturated they'll thermally throttle. Looks great in a 30-second benchmark though!)

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

#288

Post by wtallis »

daemin wrote: post #234
reitzensteinm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't the operating temperature of a mac laptop max out at something like 35c ? That's woefully low for anywhere it gets hot, like Australia for example. It basically means that on a hot day in summer you cannot use your laptop unless you're indoors in air conditioned comfort. EDIT: Yes, I checked, the MacBook Air has an operating temperature of 10-35c and a storage temperature of -25-45c, which means that it's techn…

I think you'll find that any device with a lithium ion battery will have similar temperature ratings if the manufacturer is being honest. Everything else in the machine is fine with much hotter temperatures, but cooking the battery is a bad idea.

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

#289

Post by ben-schaaf »

saas_co_de wrote: post #229
paulmd wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chip works fine. Apple used an insufficient cooling solution, Dell XPS laptops with a better cooling solution are doing fine.

The new chip has the exact same TDP rating as the old one. Unless Apple has made their thermal solution worse (highly unlikely) it is Intel that is fudging the TDP ratings.

You're assuming Apple's thermal solution was adequate to begin with.

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

#290

Post by rbanffy »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #255
wukerplank wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like it's hard to cool GPUs in desktops too if you're Apple >their maximum FP32 compute performance is 11 TFLOPS (which points to around 1340 MHz clock-rate for the Vega 64) and their peak memory bandwidth is 400 GB/s (indicating about 1600 MT/s memory speed), which is slower when compared to the Radeon RX Vega cards for desktops. The main reasons why Apple downlocks its GPUs are of course power consumption and…

Downclocking, by itself, tends to increase component lifetime. It makes sense for a professional machine that's not supposed to break after a couple years.

Of course, if the component still overheats, that completely beats the purpose of the downclocking.

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