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

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

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 413 posts

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

#321

Post by woliveirajr »

aequitas wrote: post #177
arthurfm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quinn Nelson (a.k.a. Snazzy Labs) recently did a couple of videos where he replaced the stock thermal paste on a 2017 MacBook Pro with a liquid metal thermal paste [1] and then 3 months later with a standard thermal paste [2]. With the liquid metal paste the CPU temps dropped 10°C, ran 200MHz faster and the MacBook Pro didn't thermal throttle. The standard thermal paste also saw a 7-10% improvement in thermals compar…

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…

The best scenario is full contact between the CPU/GPU/whatever makes the heat and the heatsink. No product that is put between those elements will make heat dissipation get any better, as it won't change the composition of the heatsink or of the CPU/GPU surface.

Now, in real life, CPU, GPU and heatsink don't have the perfect, more-than-mirror finished surface. There are small gaps and small peaks that prevent a full contact. And those gaps are filled with air. Air is a bad heat conductor. So, to reduce this bad, bad air effect, you fill the gaps with thermal paste.

Thermal paste will be better than air pockets. Thermal paste will be worst than metal/metal (CPU/GPU/heatsink) contact. So, put as little as thermal paste as needed, just to fill the gaps.

But put too few paste, or don't cover everything, and you'll end up with more gaps: the paste will prevent those metal/metal peaks contacts and if not spread evenly it will leave bigger gaps.

If you can't know the ideal, it's better to have a little more paste (but covering everything) than to few or badly spread (leaving bigger gaps).

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

#322

Post by n1000 »

lloeki wrote: post #252
izacus wrote: post #181

Every MacBook Pro I've ever owned locked it self down to low frequency after running a CPU intensive task for a minute or so. I thought that was common knowledge? There's NO laptops out there that wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). This is why desktop workstations are still so much faster even though they carry same frequency chips.

I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled. Thermal design and management is spot on, fans stay silent most of the time and kick in only when load requires it. Beware of anecdata. Given the stories I hear I would squarely put the various issues…

> I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled.

I find that hard to believe. I have been gaming a lot on MacBook Pro unibodies and retinas with and without an external GPUs. Especially when the internal GPU is active, the thermal load is just too high for many games and applications.

Throttling normally starts in a very subtle way by disabling clock boost and is hard to notice. Throttling below the base clock is rare and this is where it becomes really noticeable.

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

#323

Post by opencl »

izacus wrote: post #181

Every MacBook Pro I've ever owned locked it self down to low frequency after running a CPU intensive task for a minute or so. I thought that was common knowledge? There's NO laptops out there that wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). This is why desktop workstations are still so much faster even though they carry same frequency chips.

What makes you think this? Lots of laptops have severe throttling issues and the thin-and-light trend of the last few years has not really helped the situation but there are certainly laptops out there that have adequate cooling systems and do not thermally throttle. I was kind of shocked when I got the original Thinkpad X1C (14" screen and weighs 3lb) that it maintained 100% boost clock with no throttling over the entire span of hours-long video encoding workloads.

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

#324

Post by 52-6F-62 »

rbanffy wrote: post #290
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. In other tech this is called headroom.

It’s just a pragmatic approach to a physical limitation. The right choice given the clientele— debatable. But just the same it’s not unique to computer manufacturers.

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

#325

Post by dpark »

lallysingh wrote: post #54
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.

This is crazy. They have a metal body to use as a heat sink. Just put shielding on the parts that touch human skin and let the rest go toasty.

> Just put shielding on the parts that touch human skin

That’s literally the entire case. There is no part of a laptop designed to never touch human skin.

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

#326

Post by astrodust »

blattimwind wrote: post #303
amelius wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So much that it would be squirted out from under the heatblock in large blobs. Is this stuff electrically conductive?

No

Here's a typical warning from a manufacturer: http://www.arcticsilver.com/as5.htm

> While much safer than electrically conductive silver and copper greases, Arctic Silver 5 should be kept away from electrical traces, pins, and leads. While it is not electrically conductive, the compound is very slightly capacitive and could potentially cause problems if it bridges two close-proximity electrical paths.

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

#327

Post by pier25 »

Tloewald wrote: post #87

Here's a review from a dev who works at NASA: http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ Maybe the key point is he isn't running Adobe Premiere. The thermal issues in modern laptops certainly concern me, but they've been running hot for a long time now, and being thin doesn't actually change the surface area significantly.

> being thin doesn't actually change the surface area significantly

No, but it reduces the space for a better cooling system (pipes, fans, etc).

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

#328

Post by bischofs »

At this point, people in the Mac hardware engineering leadership need to start submitting their resignations or being forced out. This kind of sloppy engineering and lack of product focus is the antithesis of what Apple has stood for.

If I were Tim Cook I would fire Dan Riccio, and then resign myself and hand the company over to someone who cares about products and not supply chain optimization.

Also the whole executive Memoji thing is incredibly stupid and childish. Please take your jobs more seriously -> https://www.apple.com/leadership/

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

#329

Post by Tepix »

vivan wrote: post #223

This isn't a problem solely with the MacBook Pro - it affects most of the "ultralight" laptops these days. My XPS 13 (lovely machine, thermal issues aside) has been RMA'd 3 times because it overheated. It still gets far too hot and throttles itself so I've had to underclock it and turn off "turbo" mode. Other users have mentioned that simply repasting the CPU has caused massive improvements in temps, but I'm personal…

Which generation of XPS 13 is that?

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

#330

Post by steve_musk »

n1000 wrote: post #322
lloeki wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled. Thermal design and management is spot on, fans stay silent most of the time and kick in only when load requires it. Beware of anecdata. Given the stories I hear I would squarely put the various issues…

> I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled. I find that hard to believe. I have been gaming a lot on MacBook Pro unibodies and retinas with and without an external GPUs. Especially when the internal GPU is active, the thermal load is just too…

I thought that was the one of the points of turbo boost? To take advantage of high clock frequencies for short high intensity hurts while still running at the base clock for long term work? If the clock speed is staying above the base clock I wouldn’t consider it a problem.
Post reply on HN