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How to test MBP 2018 for possible heat, noisy fan and thermal throttling issues? Let's make tables.
- Thread starter hajime
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haha! Don't mind him. Checked out his current posts and seems to quite troll like if I were to be honest.
Encouraging
much as ever will depend on the work flow. The i9 will undoubtedly be faster, although it wont be able to reach maximum capacity, much like the XPS 15.Q-6
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Please let us know how your i9 MBP sounds like under normal productivity tasks and under heavy load.
Encouraging
Q-6
I agree that it definitely won't reach its full potential considering the size and built in cooling system of the MacBook Pro.
But today I went over to my colleague's desk, went into a folder with about 200 RAW files (AR2 from our Sony AR3s), both computers new(mine is i9 and his i7 both 32GB RAM), but of course we had installed our own personal stuff so we restarted our macs and did another batch filtering and editing. Both opened up the 200 files in Lightroom at the count of three. Mine opened all 200 files about 7 seconds faster. Not a huge difference. Afterwards we tried to export to Tiff and then JPEG files. This is where the i9 shined. An entire 42 seconds faster than the i7. Both laptops had our fans blasting. Not a real technical review because many factors could have affected the results like background apps running even after the restart, his machine was plugged in and mine was running on its battery but generally I am quite happy with the slight boost. Let me see if I can bother him again sometime in the next few days and sit him down during lunch and do a quick video of the process and show you guys.
Time is money after all. 32Gb is the big attraction, never looked back since I stepped up from 16Gb.
My primary W10 notebook is more capable and far better suited to massive sustained loads, MBP the more portable and of course OS X has it's merits.
Q-6
If you two can manage it, I'd be really interested to see how the top turbo boost gets maintained, or not, on both machines doing a task that utilized just one core.
Anthony, thanks for your firsthand account. Are the fans in your i9 Macbook Pro on a hair trigger and spin up easily versus the fans in your colleague's 2018 i7 Macbook Pro? How about in comparison to older Macbook Pros you may have had? I'm wondering if chassis is cooling the i9 sufficiently so that the fans are inaudible for everyday routine activities and only ramp up under intense and prolonged activities like the ones you tested.
8850H (Mojave B4), converting video using handbrake. Fans spinning at 6000rpm. Can only sustain around 2.5GHz. (Note there might be a bug in Mojave causing that it always uses dGPU, which may affect overall thermal).
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He seems to be a nice guy and has reviewed many stuffs. Is he technically and professionally qualified to do the job?
Here's a data point running a 6-thread image processing CPU app of mine on a 2018 MBP 2.9 GHz I9 with 32GB DDR4.
At steady state, CPU stats:
Using 570% of a CPU (so not quite 100% utilization)
2.72 GHz
72.0C
At idle state, CPU freq remains 2.7 GHz. Not sure why it's not at 2.9 GHz. Temp at 44C.
At steady state, CPU stats:
Using 570% of a CPU (so not quite 100% utilization)
2.72 GHz
72.0C
At idle state, CPU freq remains 2.7 GHz. Not sure why it's not at 2.9 GHz. Temp at 44C.
Mobile processors at full tilt often see some throttling. My 2014 (4980HQ) doesn't hold its base frequency (2.8, but rather runs at 2.6) when all 4 cores are getting hit as hard as possible. I'm still waiting a larger gamut of tests. I'd also like to see 1, 4 and 6 cores operational tests.
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Thanks for the info. Its not uncommon for processors to drop their frequency when not taxed, but usually lower than 2.7. Maybe you have a background task going on that's propping it up?
Can anyone comment on what I should be looking at in terms of benchmarks/throttling if I am interested in using this machine for Modo, zBrush, Unreal Engine, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, etc. I assume light baking in Unreal would be the most CPU intensive of all to mirror these benchmarks?
Yes, iCloud still downloading some data. Activity monitor reports 96% idle, so I guess that means about 24% of one CPU core is used. Anyway, I'm surprised it doesn't crank the speed up to 2.9 GHz given the low temp (42C).
Update: When I force the app to 1 thread, CPU frequency still doesn't get over 2.7 GHz. Weird.
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This might be a little too techinical of a check for me. What kind of app can I use to check this?
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We listened to the fans and both started about the same time. Like a second or two faster on mine but negligible to be honest.
Been using it for three days now and it hardly/rarely ramps up. Only when using my work intensive apps.
Compared to my 2016 MacBook Pro, personally I cannot tell the difference seems the same in regards to when the fans tend to hit.
I don't think the numbers that I reported above can be trusted. The tools I used don't seem to be correct. I've never used them before.
I just installed the Intel Power Gadget tool and get different, more believable, numbers in the form of graphs. I'm sorry that I didn't do this before. It's not something I've cared about before.
The first screenshot here shows the transition from idle to a 1-thread version of my app. You can see it in turbo mode hovering around 4.2 GHz. The temperature gets up to 97C.
The second screenshot shows it going from idle to 6-threads. The frequency hovers around 3 GHz which seems fine with me. The CPU package temperature goes up to 93C. What's really weird is that Intel is showing a 57% utilization (I'm assuming for the CPU), but the Activity monitor is showing 580% of one CPU which I know is what it was doing. The intel utilization number may be related to instruction slot utilization.
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Blackmagic Speed Test; Cinebench; Geekbench (the one most commonly shared).
FWIW: I have a 2018 MPB 15" i9, 32GB, 2TB arriving next week, shall be interesting to see if all the 'hot air' means anything. Having said this, is logical that the machine will run hotter. I have a dual Xeon workstation Win tower doing my grunt work in multimedia production, a wonderful Dell T7910 that doesn't miss a beat. The MBP is for travel use and where I want a bit more grunt out of on-site video capture, transcoding etc (still no UHD screen though).
A few thoughts: it may well be that both Mac OS and FCPX need to catch up with the i9 and I imagine we'll see a point update for FCPX real soon. Then there's Mojave in September or so, ditto, likely improvements & optimisations there. Whilst the rabble and rants might appear to be a little alarming just now, my experience in the past it that usually represents only a smaller few percent & one has to really judge by personal experience. If on the other hand the i9 MBP really is a dud, then it will go straight back. I don't see any problems there either & especially in the shorter term. Apple will be observing all of this ruckus closely.
Back to the benchmarking: in my experience 4k (or more) video production has been the real killer & why I went to a Win10 workstation for that. Doing a variety of 1-2hr films per year, many more smaller items. I'd suggest one of the best bench-tests therefore would be the very common: ingest 4k H264, transcode, edit, & scrub on a 1080p timeline, then render a 1080p H264 vid. Say 30mins worth. Q
Performance varies enormously from Premier, to FCPX to DaVinci Resolve. I'll be especially looking at Resolve 15 & which generally outperforms the other two & overall is a much better piece of kit in my view. The next version of FCPX may be of interest as well.
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You could use prime95 and do a single core benchmark that you set to run for some really long time (1000 seconds or something) under the "options" - "benchmark" menu. Then download the Intel Power gadget and watch as the temps heat up and what the frequency does.
Dave2D is one of the best unbiased reviewers on YouTube, and he's also pro Mac. Nor is he likely to be inaccurate with his findings.
Q-6
I just got my 13" base model and seen some weird throttling in the Intel Power Gadget.. It throttles to 400Mhz for no reason. The fans go nuts and its slows to crawl and a bit later its fine again. Seems like a Mojave B4 issue or something... The fans come up very early while on the old model it would only spin faster if the cpu was reaching 100c now it doesn't come close to 100c. Anyone else seeing this happening?
EDIT: Right now it isn't doing anything special and the CPU is only at around 20-30% temperatures around 50-60c but the fans are on 5000+RPM. My old 13"TB doesn't do these high fan speeds...
EDIT: Right now it isn't doing anything special and the CPU is only at around 20-30% temperatures around 50-60c but the fans are on 5000+RPM. My old 13"TB doesn't do these high fan speeds...
Outta curiosity, are u running these right after setting it up or has things settled down over the last 12-24 hours?
Just wondering if it could be a background task e.g. spotlight indexing or icloud sync
The indexing is already done. If I let it completely idle the usage falls to 0-1% and its literally doing nothing. But throttling to 400Mhz shouldn't be possible in any circumstance and especially not when the temperature is around 60c so this must be a Mojave bug or something.
Not good, not good at all
My primary W10 notebook with the 8750H holds up extremely well. TBH I don't see the point of Apple using this level of hardware only for it to be crippled by poor design choice... 3 hours full load...
Q-6