iPhone 15 Pro Max 3dmark stress testing to validate if your phone has overheating problems

[abhi182]

A little bit of background first: I had picked an iphone 15 pro max for my wife during a trip to the US a couple of months ago (prices for the pro/pro max are about 30% lower vs my country)
The new phone has exhibited noticeably higher levels of heating episodes than the older one (13 pro max)
Now I understand that it's not uncommon but what I am unsure of is whether its because of software issue on a new chip (thus fixable in the future) or on account of hardware issues (the so called silicon lottery)

Now I have a trip to the US coming up again in two weeks and am wondering if I should raise a replacement claim . Raising the same in my country, while feasible may not be straightforward, esp because the SKUs this year are slightly different (since the US model is esim only) which can cause issues if raising a claim outside the US. Either way, claiming a replacement will be a hassle so I am wondering if there is an objective way to test heating issues.

One way I could think is running a stress test like 3dmark and checking if the scores are in line with the median for this model.
Either way, what I am hoping for is a way to figure out if the episodic occurences are down to some software gremlins (which will get fixed in due time hopefully and a replacement wont help anyway)

or if its a problem isolated to specific batches / units in which case the hassles associated with this would be worthwhile.
Any thoughts?

Edit (11th Dec) : Post #7 has a screenshot of my extended thermal stress test using 3dmark.
Sine there aren’t too many baseline samples to compare against, it may not be useful for other users in doubt to post theirs

 

[JPack]

There is no objective way to do it because nobody has collected a large sample of devices to perform such research. Even if you did have the data, Apple Store clerks wouldn’t understand it.

 

[now i see it]

While the 15 PM phones most definitely run hot sometimes and really hot occasionally, that doesn’t mean they’re ‘overheating’.
In fact, they aren’t. They just run really freaking hot.

 

[BugeyeSTI]

Ridiculous, I've never had any heating issues while charging, restoring, updating, running multiple benchmarks, taking pictures, videos, etc. since I've had my 15PM day after release. All the while everyone was saying it was a 15 Pro or 15PM issue, plenty of forum member were saying there 12, 13 and 14 Pro/Pro Max we're getting hot too. The common denominator, all were running iOS17... This doesn't effect 90%+ of the phones out there, it was a software issue and iOS17 still has other issues that need to be addressed. Last year the 14 Pro/Pro Max had fluttering cameras, green tint and other issues that all were software related.. Every year have software issues that need to be iron out, plain and simple

 

[sstiwari]

A little bit of background first: I had picked an iphone 15 pro max for my wife during a trip to the US a couple of months ago (prices for the pro/pro max are about 30% lower vs my country)
The new phone has exhibited noticeably higher levels of heating episodes than the older one (13 pro max)
Now I understand that it's not uncommon but what I am unsure of is whether its because of software issue on a new chip (thus fixable in the future) or on account of hardware issues (the so called silicon lottery)

Now I have a trip to the US coming up again in two weeks and am wondering if I should raise a replacement claim . Raising the same in my country, while feasible may not be straightforward, esp because the SKUs this year are slightly different (since the US model is esim only) which can cause issues if raising a claim outside the US. Either way, claiming a replacement will be a hassle so I am wondering if there is an objective way to test heating issues.

One way I could think is running a stress test like 3dmark and checking if the scores are in line with the median for this model.
Either way, what I am hoping for is a way to figure out if the episodic occurences are down to some software gremlins (which will get fixed in due time hopefully and a replacement wont help anyway)

or if its a problem isolated to specific batches / units in which case the hassles associated with this would be worthwhile.
Any thoughts?

So, what I did at Genius Bar was running Antutu App on 14 PM and 15 PM side by side with brightness set to max and auto brightness off.

15PM started dimming aggressively in a couple of minutes due to heat build up and 14 PM completed the test without lowering its peak brightness.

Genius Bar had no option but to replace. The replacement 15 PM (brown box) is significantly better in terms of thermals.

However, later I observed that on the replacement 15 PM, telephoto camera snaps have a consistent grey patch at a particular location. Then the camera module was replaced.

It’s been a month and it’s going good.

 

[Fat_Guy]

If there wasn’t an issue, Apple would not be addressing the thermal issue on next year’s model. That says more than any study…

 

[abhi182]

So, what I did at Genius Bar was running Antutu App on 14 PM and 15 PM side by side with brightness set to max and auto brightness off.

15PM started dimming aggressively in a couple of minutes due to heat build up and 14 PM completed the test without lowering its peak brightness.

Genius Bar had no option but to replace. The replacement 15 PM (brown box) is significantly better in terms of thermals.

However, later I observed that on the replacement 15 PM, telephoto camera snaps have a consistent grey patch at a particular location. Then the camera module was replaced.

It’s been a month and it’s going good.

Thanks - I found that 3dmark has a mode for an extended 20 minute stress test that runs the fairly demanding benchmark in a 20 minute.

I ran them side by side on a 13PM and a 15PM. After a few loops , the 15PM was a bit more warm/hot than the 13PM but nothing too unusual.
The reported thermal stability from the test was 66% which seems to be about par for course (although I did not find too many other representative samples)
Similarly was the case with the best and lowest loops score of ~4200 and 2700 respectively.

If at all possible, would you be in a position to tun this test on your phone to see how it fares?

Would also request other users with 15 Pro/ Pro max to do the same as this does seem to be a reasonably objective mechanism to assess the actual thermal performance of the hardware (and to determine any variances from 1 unit to another)

PS: Reason to believe this to be an objective measurement is thus:

1) Since it‘s a CPU/GPU bound test loading both to near 100%, any units prone to overheating should throttle quicly and show lower thermal stabilty/ high variance between best and lowest scores

2) The perf graph for a device prone to overheating should show high variance between successive runs in the stresst test graph

3) 20 mins of very high CPU/GPU load is likely to be a very unusual scenario in real life so if a device fares ok on this, it is unlikely that it would exhibit any major problems down the road on account of thermals

 

[hamiltonDSi]

Just enjoy the iPhone. Its fine.
I’ve upgraded to a 15 PM from a 13 PM and its really the same bro