A bunch of people are returning their 16” MacBook Pro’s or getting them exchanged
because of a really annoying issue that I personally wasn’t aware of. Unfortunately
when they get their replacement the same issue arises.
I even saw one forum user say they’re on their third 16” MacBook pro, and for some
people it’s such a big deal that they just return it and move back to their 2017 or even
2015 MacBook.
In this video not only will I tell you about this issue and give you multiple ways to fix
or at least greatly improve it but also a technique to increase your MacBooks battery
life and keep it running much cooler.
The hardware in all or most of these MacBooks is perfectly fine, the issue is partially
Apples fault with software and design, but mostly intel’s being so behind in their
promises.
When Apple redesigned the MacBook Pro in 2016 it got a lot smaller and lighter while at
the same time running quieter than the 2015.
Four years later we have the next major redesign and a ton of people are upgrading to the 16”
which in most ways is a huge improvement. In particular I’m seeing a lot of people
moving from 2015 and 2017 MacBooks and while they love the performance they are complaining
about super loud fans while doing very basic tasks like when connected to an external display.
In many cases the fans are running constantly at 100% speed which is super annoying while
their old MacBook Pro was inaudible.
How can this be true when the 16” MacBok pro is supposed to run cooler and quieter
as we reported in our review. We decided to dig deep and spent a ton of time researching
and testing to find out exactly what's going on.
First off, this issue is completely normal with the 16” MacBook Pro and all of them
have it. It doesn’t matter which external display you connect to, but we personally
tested with a 4K, 5K, and Apples 6K XDR. Once you connect, The MacBook Pro automatically
switches from the intel integrated gpu to the much more powerful AMD graphics.
This is where I highly recommend downloading the free tool GFX card status.
It will not only show which graphics card is active but also what task or program is
causing dedicated graphics to run.
I love it because I personally found a simple background program that was causing my Macs
dedicated graphics to always stay, causing battery life to drop by about 2 hours so now
I always make sure to close it.
It makes sense that Apple wants the dedicated graphics to run but unfortunately they put
out more heat which means faster fan temps. Now this is also the case with older MacBooks,
so it doesn't explain why it runs loud.
I ran all my tests with a low power benchmark to put a small load on the CPU that simulates
simple use so I could have consistent results and the first thing I found is that Apple’s
default fan profiles seem to work differently on the 16” MacBook pro than the 15”.
The older 15” fans seem to work the same regardless of an external display. Connected
to my 6K XDR the fans ran at 50% while the 16” ran at 65% sounding noticeably louder
which my Apple watch proved with a 2-3db difference 1 foot away.
If you didn’t catch our review, the 16” has a larger, more capable cooling design
and even though the fans don't spin as fast at full speed they are actually louder overall
which doesn’t help.
The other thing that doesn’t help is that Apple ramps up the fans much quicker on the
16” than the previous 15” MacBooks which keeps it cooler and improves performance.
Apple takes this even further, honestly too far, when you’re connected to an external
display. By itself under the same load the Mac stayed at 80C with the fans completely
silent at 10% speed, but when I connected to the XDR the fans instantly ramped to 100%
and stayed there until the CPU dropped to 55C.
At that point the fans slowed down to 65% resulting in 65C while the 2019 15” MacBook
pro with the same exact processor chose to run at 75C and much quieter. Older MacBooks
with 4 cores would be completely silent at this point.
I don’t know why, but for once, Apple is prioritizing temps over noise, and causing
this 16” to be noisy even during simple tasks but this is where the first fix comes
in and with surprisingly good results.
The program I would suggest is called … TG Fan pro. With it I created my own fan profile
similar to the 15” MacBooks that cools properly when I’m pushing it but run at lower speeds
when I’m not.
I set the fans manually to 35% and now the CPU temps were at the same 75C as the 15”
but the 16” MacBook actually ran quieter, silent from where I sat. As soon as I turned
my profile off the fans jumped to 100% and when I unplugged from the display it went
back down to 10% and 80C proving that the fan profiles are much different.
Hopefully Apple will address this in software if it wasn’t intentional, but if not, creating
a custom fan profile is the first way to fix your loud 16” MacBook pro when connected
to an external display but I also have another helpful tip for every MacBook owner.
Some people who upgraded from a 2016 or 2017 MacBook are complaining about fan noise even
without an external display, so this louder fan profile isn’t the issue. All of them
are saying how they love the performance increase but not the noise, and the issue is Intel
not Apple.
When Apple was designing the 2016 model intel promised to have 10nm CPU’s ready for this
slimmer and lighter Mac. They couldn't deliver and Apple had to make it work with its quieter
fans and unfortunately we still don’t have high end 10nm chips in 2020.
In these 4 years the CPU’s have gone from 4 cores to 8 cores and performance has doubled
and since we’re still stuck on the less efficient 14nm design so the only way Intel
was able to keep improving performance is to put use more power and out a lot more heat.
The 2016 MacBook Pro took about 1 min to heat up slowly 95C if all cores were pushed to
100% where the new 8 core 16” MBP went from 65C to 95C almost instantly. That's how much
heat is put out when the CPU is being used.
Now I know that this is under full load but there's another big difference and that's
turbo boost clocks. These laptop CPU’s run up to 5.0Ghz now but to hit that high of a
speed requires more power meaning more heat, where in 2016 the best processor only went
up to 3.8 Ghz.
Intel uses turbo boost to essentially overclock the CPU to 5Ghz if you use 1 core and which
required over 50 watts of power which is crazy if you consider the whole CPU is rated at
45 watts.
Over the years intel kept raising turbo boost higher and higher in order to keep improving
performance while stuck on this 14nm design and it absolutely did help.
The issue comes in when you’re doing simple tasks but the Macbook keeps spiking up to
5Ghz in order to open a program half a second faster the CPU wattage keeps spiking and puts
out way more heat. This is where I found a special tool that every Mac owner needs to
know about. It’s called.. turbo boost switcher.
This awesome tool allows you to turn off your turbo boost which will stop these massive
wattage spikes allowing your MacBook to run much cooler and quieter.
Some people have noted a 25% increase in battery life during simple use and CPU temps of up
to 25C lower because the CPU wattage isn’t trying to hit 5Ghz every time you do something.
You can also buy the Pro version which allows you to set up custom profiles like toggling
turbo boost based on power, fan speeds, or even for specific apps.
With turbo boost disabled on the 16” the CPU never used more than 20watts or went above
62C in single core tasks compared to 53 watts and 97C with turbo boost on.
Now you are taking a tradeoff in performance but if you’re issue is noise or heat this
will really help and thankfully for most normal tasks it's hard to tell a difference. Now
for tougher things like Photo or video editing and rendering, it can be noticable, but depending
on what you do it may actually be worth it.
In Geekbench 5 our multi-core score dropped from 7021 to 5003 when we turned off turbo
boost, but the laptop stayed at 60C the whole time with fans completely silent and never
used more than 38 watts compared to hitting over 90 watts with turbo on.
With turbo boost off the 16” is still almost 50% faster the best 2017 MacBook while staying
completely cool and silent under load.
Under full 100% load in cinebench my 8 core 16” almost matches the 6 core 16” in performance
while staying completely silent after 3 runs and the CPU not going above 83C instead of
running at 95C with fans at 100% and used only half the CPU power saving battery life.
This means we’re trading about 30% performance for a completely cool and silent system with
a few extra hours of battery life, or if you can afford to spend $300 more for an 8 core
with turbo off instead of a 6 core, you get the same performance but a completely silent
and really cool running MacBook instead of the old 6 cores that needed to go in the freezer.
Now all this starts to matter even more when an external display is attached and the dedicated
graphics are used which also put out more heat. Even though the new 5500M is much more
efficient with its 7nm design Apple actually pushes up to 55 watts to it compared to only
35watts just a few years ago resulting in 3 to 5 times more graphics performance which
is really impressive.
Even though Apple made the 16” the same size as the old 2015 15” to allow for better
cooling it’s still impossible to keep up as well with all the heat from the much more
powerful graphics and super hot 14nm CPU’s.
Thankfully the graphics don’t overuse power for simple tasks but if you do want to cut
down heat and noise caused by the dedicated GPU being always on with external displays
you can use an eGPU. Even with stock fan profiles and with turbo
boost set to default I noticed that the MacBook ran much cooler and quieter when I had an
eGPU connected and the fan profile seemed to match the one used when the Mac is by itself.
This makes perfect sense, the dedicated AMD 5500M isn’t having to stay powered on pumping
even more heat into the thin laptop with hot CPU but instead the eGPU with much better
cooling can take care of that.
So there you guys go, if you’re getting more noise from your 16” MacBook Pro than
your previous 15”, especially compared to the older four core models there is nothing
wrong with your MacBook.
The fans are just larger and slightly louder and Apple is being way more proactive to keep
this Mac cool while still providing a massive boost in performance compared to previous
MacBooks.
If you hate that extra noise use TGfan pro to allow it to get slightly hotter like 15”
MacBooks but quieter or turn off turbo boost for a silent running machine that runs quieter
and still faster than old Macs while having much better battery life.
We have links to all utilities in the video description, thanks for watching, click up
there to subscribe and if you want to see how these awesome 16” compares to the 2015
or to our Mac Pro click right there. This has been max and I’ll see you in the next
one.