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cpu hit 98 degrees when transferring photos?
- Thread starter mpc91
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I am not sure what is normal with these things anymore. I was hitting between 95-100c a couple of days ago syncing my phone using iTunes and an Apple USB-C to Lightning cable. Perhaps the "new normal?"
If your machine is doing intensive work, yes, it’s normal. Depends on what exactly the software does. Could also be a bug (e.g. setting false priorities that makes the system allocate more cpu resources to the task then nessesary).
sustained multiple reads and writes at the same time can cause that, be it copying files, accessing programs, swapping page file, spotlight indexing (turn it off for photos or any file formats for which indexing is unnecessary, it's notoriously intrusive and would instantaneously go to work and cpu-hog if said copied files are withing its indexing domain, esp multiple small ones like photos.)
good old copying alone in and of itself however don't typically cause cpu to go beyond 60c in my case (2012 mbp i7 filevault on running sierra)
then again i take good care of the machine and swap TIM every 6 months, and one I use isn't exactly typical apple gunk
good old copying alone in and of itself however don't typically cause cpu to go beyond 60c in my case (2012 mbp i7 filevault on running sierra)
then again i take good care of the machine and swap TIM every 6 months, and one I use isn't exactly typical apple gunk
Its the new normal it seems. Its not right that we're seeing those temps, but I see the 80s just moving around in Lightroom, so I'm not terribly surprised.
Stop visiting sites that mine cryptocurrency on your machine and you will be fine.
Really people, its not rocket science. If the CPU does some work, it tries to go as fast as it can — and it gets hot. It doesn't matter whether you think how demanding or important that work is. A CPU will happily get hot just adding two numbers and discarding the result over and over again. Its up to the software to give the system hints about how the resources should be used and if you use badly optimised apps like Chrome, well, then your machine will run hot.
I frequent just normal, tech/news/humor sites and I'm shocked to hear my fans spin up for no reason at all. My older laptop doesn't have this issue
Its not, but unlike prior years, the thin design is not allowing for efficient cooling. Remember there's 6 cores in the 15" laptop (and 4 in the 13). That thin case was not designed for such hot running processors. No matter how you slice it, the MBP gets too hot doing the most mundane tasks, I hit 90c on boot up for some bizarre reason. Lets stop blaming the CPU/Intel and blame Apple for slapping a CPU into the same desire. How long did they have the info/test chips from Intel to properly design a cooling solution but didn't? Apple isn't alone, other computer makers rested on their laurels as well with similar results.
This has nothing to do with cooling. When running mundane tasks, you CPU should be at least 90% in idle state, by definition. Right now, as I am writing this, my i9 CPU utilisation is barely 4%, its frequency is at 1.4Ghz (low power state) average and it consumes 4.5Watts of power. Are you really going to argue that the cooling solution can't dissipate 5-10watts??
If your CPU is running on high load during mundane tasks, then these tasks are not mundane from the CPU's perspective. If you think that they should be, then you most likely have a software problem. That is, software that is not properly releasing process time to the OS/not using power assertions. CPUs are not smart. If you give them code to run, they are going to run it as fast as they can. No matter how mundane this code appears. This is why OS is essentially powering down the CPU multiple times per second if it can decide that no essential real-time process is running. A single badly coded application can mess all of this up.
By the way, what has really changed compared to prior years is the amount of crap people start putting in their websites, like miners and whatnot.
Yep I pretty much agree. I would hate to have to listen to fan noise because I was doing mundane tasks... That would pretty much rule out the machine on that (no matter how fast it is). I'd probably sacrifice performance by going for an Air just so as to not have a machine which heats up, is noisy and I am guessing kills it's battery trying to do minor tasks.
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You are not wrong, but people are exhibiting issues and it's not because everyone are using crypto sites. Most users are probably going from comparable experiences between new and old machines doing the same thing.
Its very much possible, but I do find it annoying how everything is lumped together. There might be users with genuine issues (due to whatever reasons), but I am willing to bet that most of the "my laptop runs hot" threads are because there is some process somewhere grabbing the CPU uptime. But when all this gets lumped together, it just creates this popular perception of 2018 laptops as permanently overheating, which is simply ridiculous nonsense.
It has everything to do with cooling, or if you will, thermal management.
I can do x, y, and z on my 2012 rMBP and it does not get hot. I do the same exact thing on my 2018 MBP, and I'm in the 80c range.
We're not talking about high loads, that's the thing.
If you are getting high CPU temps (80C or above) and fan activation with your machine running on idle (low frequency/low wattage), your laptop is most likely defective.
Depends on the fan-curve, if the fan would for example completely stop then 5-10 Watts may be enough to cause high temperatures over time. Same goes for a compromised airflow with very low fan RPM. Apple has always valued quietness of operation over cooler temps, meaning they will let the CPU get quite hot before turning up the fan. Thats why I tweaked the fan-curve of my MacMini and raised the minimum-RPM to a level that was just barely noticeable. Caused idle-temps to drop by quite a lot.
I'm not while idling, when I'm using Lightroom. I've said many times, it idles in 50c to 60c range. Using Lightroom as I said above shows a spike in temps
Just look at the picture below, I've disabled Volta and I'm seeing temps approach the 80c range. All I'm doing is selecting images in the library tab, nothing else, going from picture to picture in the the grid of images, nothing more and as you can by the utilization I'm not pushing the CPUs
Based on this and my prior research, its my belief that turbo mode is the main factor in the CPUs getting hot. You can see the power and frequency spiking at 40/4.0 respectfully and the temp increase follows that power curve. Enabling Volta and turning off turbo boost does not show a marked decrease in performance (at least in going from image to image in LR) but temps are much cooler and the power utilization curve is flatter.
Case in point: I just opened the MacRumors main page and noticed how my CPU power usage has spiked. Looking in the activity monitor, I see that the macrumors safari tab has close to 100% CPU utilization. Why? What is that important work it has to do? Looking into the dev menu, I see dozens and dozens of various scripts running and fetching stuff from across the internet — ads, tracking, I don't even know what. And it seems to go on and indefinitely while the main site is open. Have a MR front page visible in the browser: you get a CPU spike, the CPU turbos and goes into a high-power mode, your power consumption skyrockets and obviously the machine gets hot. If others sites you mention have similar behaviour, no wonder you are experiencing what you are experiencing.
Luckily the forums don't suffer from this.
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But that is exactly my point. You ARE pushing the CPU. Your picture suggests that two cores of the CPU are running close to 100% utilisation. PowerGadget is misleading in how it reports CPU utilisation: 100% there means 100% load across all cores. Since you have 12 of them (6 + hyper threading), 18% is quite a lot. Other evidence: your CPU consumes almost 30W of power and is utilising turbo boost. This all means that it has been thrown work to do. Check what Activity Monitor says about Lightroom.
Once again: it doesn't matter whether you think that your workload is low. What matters is what the software does. And in your case, the software is causing some of the CPU cores to run at their peak. Which is not surprising, since Adobe software quality is generally on the low side.
P.S. Of course, in this scenario the new machine is expected to run hotter then the old one — the old one has lower clocks. There is nothing abnormal about it though and I don't see any heat management issues in your graphs.
Luckily the forums don't suffer from this.
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But that is exactly my point. You ARE pushing the CPU. Your picture suggests that two cores of the CPU are running close to 100% utilisation. PowerGadget is misleading in how it reports CPU utilisation: 100% there means 100% load across all cores. Since you have 12 of them (6 + hyper threading), 18% is quite a lot. Other evidence: your CPU consumes almost 30W of power and is utilising turbo boost. This all means that it has been thrown work to do. Check what Activity Monitor says about Lightroom.
Once again: it doesn't matter whether you think that your workload is low. What matters is what the software does. And in your case, the software is causing some of the CPU cores to run at their peak. Which is not surprising, since Adobe software quality is generally on the low side.
P.S. Of course, in this scenario the new machine is expected to run hotter then the old one — the old one has lower clocks. There is nothing abnormal about it though and I don't see any heat management issues in your graphs.
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I can see this from 2 different perspectives...
As consumers, we always ask for more and faster. Manufactures give the consumers what they want. Intel designs a chip with a rated TDP yet said chips run at higher TDP's. Manufactures try to save a buck and reuse what they can.
We are dealing with an extra 2 cores on the 2018's and 4 extra hyperthreaded cores. They are gonna run hot under load. However, just having to return 1 MacBook Pro due to excessive heat/fan/battery issues, I can see why people are getting so upset. I have had in the past 2 months, a 2017 i5 13" TB, 2017 i5 nTB (wife's), 2018 i5 13" TB, (3) 2018 i7 2.6 15" TB's. With all those systems, I only had issues with 2. My wife's nTB model fans pretty much ran constant until I did a complete reset and did not use her previous backup. After that it was quiet as ever. The 1st 15" I had I sent back due to Amazon not price matching another store (talking $450 difference), but had 0 problems other than 1 KP before both updates. I was really hesitant at first on giving it up but the savings couldn't justify keeping it. The 2nd one I received same configuration had MAJOR issues with heat, temperature spikes, fan noise, a battery that would never fully charge, and some strange graphical glitches (should have known something was up with it on Saturday when I did About This Mac and it showed the Radeon graphics in use doing nothing). Bottom was hot as hell. I tried resetting it, resetting the nVme, SMC, nothing changed it. Exchanged it yesterday, and this 1 performs like my first one, with idle temps around 40-42, and while surfing in the 50's, sometimes occasionally 60's. Under Cinebench mid 90's. Fans only kick in when needed.
I think a lot of this has to do with the lottery of your machine, who built it, what day, etc. I can almost guarantee you if I would have taking apart that 2nd 15" I would have found either to much TIM, not enough, or something not making contact. My 1st XPS 15" last year came like that. When I took the heatsink off it looked like someone bathed in TIM. After reapplying TIM, temps dropped 15-18 degrees! I just don't think the quality is still up there at the Apple assembly plants.
It really sucks that people are dealing with these issues, especially on such expensive computers. For the cost of these laptops, they should be white glove! However, I will say this, and this is not just an Apple issue. Its an industry wide issue. My wife did not like the Mac and wanted to go back to Windows. I returned her Mac and bought her a Lenovo YOGA 920. Awesome system, i7 8550u, 16G DDR4, 1TB SSD. System was fast, well built. BUT, the fans stayed on constant, with temps around 40-50 doing light tasks, and 90's doing heavy tasks. She hated the noise, so I returned it (so glad my Best Buy is awesome). This time made her go to the store. Salesperson sold her on the Surface Book 2. Really nice system. I actually really like it. 13.5", i7 8650u, 16GB LPDDR3, 512GB SSD, and the nVidia 1050 graphics card. Doing basic tasks, again temps in the 50-60's, and heavier loads high 90's. Fans are louder than the Mac's under load. Remember Microsoft is using a custom vapor chamber cooler to! We all want thin, light portable laptops. This is what we get... Funny thing is she doesn't notice it cause SHE picked out this laptop. If I would have came home with it she would have complained and it would have went back lol.
Again, does this make it right? Nope. But we as consumers drive the industry. We tell them we want, want, want. They have ass deliver to make the most profit.
As consumers, we always ask for more and faster. Manufactures give the consumers what they want. Intel designs a chip with a rated TDP yet said chips run at higher TDP's. Manufactures try to save a buck and reuse what they can.
We are dealing with an extra 2 cores on the 2018's and 4 extra hyperthreaded cores. They are gonna run hot under load. However, just having to return 1 MacBook Pro due to excessive heat/fan/battery issues, I can see why people are getting so upset. I have had in the past 2 months, a 2017 i5 13" TB, 2017 i5 nTB (wife's), 2018 i5 13" TB, (3) 2018 i7 2.6 15" TB's. With all those systems, I only had issues with 2. My wife's nTB model fans pretty much ran constant until I did a complete reset and did not use her previous backup. After that it was quiet as ever. The 1st 15" I had I sent back due to Amazon not price matching another store (talking $450 difference), but had 0 problems other than 1 KP before both updates. I was really hesitant at first on giving it up but the savings couldn't justify keeping it. The 2nd one I received same configuration had MAJOR issues with heat, temperature spikes, fan noise, a battery that would never fully charge, and some strange graphical glitches (should have known something was up with it on Saturday when I did About This Mac and it showed the Radeon graphics in use doing nothing). Bottom was hot as hell. I tried resetting it, resetting the nVme, SMC, nothing changed it. Exchanged it yesterday, and this 1 performs like my first one, with idle temps around 40-42, and while surfing in the 50's, sometimes occasionally 60's. Under Cinebench mid 90's. Fans only kick in when needed.
I think a lot of this has to do with the lottery of your machine, who built it, what day, etc. I can almost guarantee you if I would have taking apart that 2nd 15" I would have found either to much TIM, not enough, or something not making contact. My 1st XPS 15" last year came like that. When I took the heatsink off it looked like someone bathed in TIM. After reapplying TIM, temps dropped 15-18 degrees! I just don't think the quality is still up there at the Apple assembly plants.
It really sucks that people are dealing with these issues, especially on such expensive computers. For the cost of these laptops, they should be white glove! However, I will say this, and this is not just an Apple issue. Its an industry wide issue. My wife did not like the Mac and wanted to go back to Windows. I returned her Mac and bought her a Lenovo YOGA 920. Awesome system, i7 8550u, 16G DDR4, 1TB SSD. System was fast, well built. BUT, the fans stayed on constant, with temps around 40-50 doing light tasks, and 90's doing heavy tasks. She hated the noise, so I returned it (so glad my Best Buy is awesome). This time made her go to the store. Salesperson sold her on the Surface Book 2. Really nice system. I actually really like it. 13.5", i7 8650u, 16GB LPDDR3, 512GB SSD, and the nVidia 1050 graphics card. Doing basic tasks, again temps in the 50-60's, and heavier loads high 90's. Fans are louder than the Mac's under load. Remember Microsoft is using a custom vapor chamber cooler to! We all want thin, light portable laptops. This is what we get... Funny thing is she doesn't notice it cause SHE picked out this laptop. If I would have came home with it she would have complained and it would have went back lol.
Again, does this make it right? Nope. But we as consumers drive the industry. We tell them we want, want, want. They have ass deliver to make the most profit.
I agree with the overall message of your post, but I'd like to comment on one issue. Personally, I don't see why a laptop shouldn't get hot under load. After all, its doing useful work and we want it do it as fast as possible.
I think the issue is less with the fact that these machines run hot under load, but that definitions of "load" as understood by the user and as it actually works in hardware differ. I think maflynn's position illustrates this very good. According to him, the laptop is getting unacceptably hot while performing a mundane, simple task. From the laptops perspective though, the task is probably far from mundane.
And this is where the software has to do the right thing. Modern CPUs have the potential to reach incredible performance when needed, but will run hot, but they can also be very efficient and cool if real-time performance is not needed. Unfortunately, its not something that the CPU can decide, since it is not aware of your intended use. So software has to help out. Apple already goes to great length here — they generally throttle their daemons (background system tasks) not to occupy too much resources, they reduce priority on threads that own invisible windows (App Nap), they synchronise waking points of threads in order to keep the CPU in halted state as long as possible and minimise power states transaction (timer coalescing) etc. etc. But if your application uses suboptimal algorithms or requires highest priority without actually needing it, you will suffer obvious consequences. Does Lightroom really need to have a CPU at 100% just when moving things around, like in maflynn's case? Probably not. As to why they do it, we can only speculate. Maybe they run an immediate draw loop, that constantly redraws the contents or performs unnecessary checks.
My point is that with modern gen of CPUs, we need better quality software, which is aware of and properly manages the power consumption concerns. Need to do something really important (like generate some content for the user)? Set an appropriate power assertion for a short time, get as much boost as you can and finish the task quickly. Just doing some background email fetching? Set yourself on lowest priority and make sure to yield control as soon as possible. Unfortunately, most devs just don't bother. Adobe and many others have this "there is only our open app and nothing besides our open app is important" attitude, which is ultimately very harmful. And of course, the user is more likely to blame the hardware then the software.
so you're saying browsing images is pushing my 2018 MBP causing it to get hot, when doing the same thing in a 2012 resulted in no heat issues? That's some significant gymnastics, especially since the image I included showed little utilization. How can I be pushing the cpu with utilization so low
Ok, but lets take it on the flip side. While I'll not concede my point, lets take a different tact Apple has had abundant time to develop a thermal solution to accommodate that increased heat, so regardless if you agree with me on or not about simple tasks pushing the CPU. The fact remains, the CPU is getting hot, apple chose to do nothing with the thermal design.
Its like you only read one line of my post... I think I have explained in some detail why your image actually shows significant CPU utilisation (aka one or more CPU cores under full load).
And again, if you 2012 didn't get as hot using the same app, there can be many reasons. Could be because of its lower clocks (so lower heat output in single or dual-core operation), different software version, or a bug in Lightroom/macOS that causes high CPU utilisation in the 2018 machine but didn't do so in the old machine. You can get better insight by looking at power consumption of the old machine's CPU. Its its low, then its an software bug of some sort.
In your particular case, Apple doesn't have to do *anything* about the thermal design because there is nothing wrong with the thermal design. Your CPU operates at 60% of its TDP, generating 27 watts of thermal energy! Its a significant load and higher temperatures are expected. If your idle temperatures are in the high 50s, and max operating temperature is at 99, your observed 80C are exactly the 60% of the way. Its how Mac laptops have operated for years (minimal fan operation at idle, maximal safe temperature at the sustained TDP) — the cooling system and the fan curve is designed to make the relationship between temperature and the power consumption more or less linear. And this is also why you see lower temperatures when limiting the TDP of the CPU.
If you want to run your CPU at 30 watts and still have a cool and quiet laptop, you need massive heat exchangers and very large fans. Or smaller, loud fans. The first option is really not achievable in the smaller form factor (as I mentioned in the other thread, Razor pulls it off by dedicating a lot of space to cooling + directly sucking the air via the open bottom of the chassis — not an option for a laptop that people like to use on their lap or on the go).
I guess in the past these CPUs weren't so trigger-happy with Turbo Boost, and Apple's laptops had better cooling.
That is what is bothering me. Instead of Apple in any way modifying the thermal design, people are coming up with workarounds such as Macs Fan, Volta and others to try to compensate. End-user modifications and compromises just don't seem like the proper solution for a "problem" (and I will put it in quotes because I realize some don't view it as one) that perhaps should have been better dealt with in the design stage. Using the i9 for example, would it have been the end of the world if they had reserved it for a workstation type model that was a little thicker and newly designed? I know "Thin is in" but it seems we are seeing the limits without a design overhaul.
I think both reasons are the cause. Apple should have updated their design knowing full well the implications of putting a 6 core processor into such a thin design. I see turbo boost as the major factor, but intel provides samples to its major customers well in advance to design systems around the new cpus.
Would you recommend the 2018 MacBook Pro ?
I currently have a 2010 15" MacBook Pro and the 256 MB video is no longer enough.
If you need a new Mac, I do think the 2018 model is the best one out there right now. I just think people need to know all the positive and negatives. There are negatives, but an informed consumer can then make the decision if its worth it.
For me, I still think its worth it, the machine is well built, and does everything I want it too.