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m370x throttling

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Xgm541

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 3, 2011
1,098
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For those of you who already have your machines, have you noticed the m370x throttling a lot? I ran furmark using bootcamp in Windows 10 preview, and about 2 minutes in, the GPU core speed drops from 800mhz to 400mhz and remains like that for the duration of the test. The top temperature was 76 degrees, which doesnt seem like it's high. After the initial climb to 76, and throttling down to 400mhz, the GPU remained at around 65 degrees without climbing back up again.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I know Macs aren't gaming machines, but with my old 2012 with the 650M, i used to game for hours on end without noticeable throttling, so this is concerning.

P.S. this is for a CTO 2.5/1TB.
 

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Xgm541 said:
For those of you who already have your machines, have you noticed the m370x throttling a lot? I ran furmark using bootcamp in Windows 10 preview, and about 2 minutes in, the GPU core speed drops from 800mhz to 400mhz and remains like that for the duration of the test. The top temperature was 76 degrees, which doesnt seem like it's high. After the initial climb to 76, and throttling down to 400mhz, the GPU remained at around 65 degrees without climbing back up again.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I know Macs aren't gaming machines, but with my old 2012 with the 650M, i used to game for hours on end without noticeable throttling, so this is concerning.

P.S. this is for a CTO 2.5/1TB.
Click to expand...

Furmark is useless as no game will run gpu like that. Get MSI Afterburner or GPU-Z and enable logging and then play an intensive game like Crysis 3 or Witcher 3 for 30 minutes and report back on the speed and temps.
 
Furmark will ALWAYS throttle up and down, even on machines built for Windows. Not a reliable indicator of actual performance at all.
 
Xgm541 said:
For those of you who already have your machines, have you noticed the m370x throttling a lot? I ran furmark using bootcamp in Windows 10 preview, and about 2 minutes in, the GPU core speed drops from 800mhz to 400mhz and remains like that for the duration of the test. The top temperature was 76 degrees, which doesnt seem like it's high. After the initial climb to 76, and throttling down to 400mhz, the GPU remained at around 65 degrees without climbing back up again.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I know Macs aren't gaming machines, but with my old 2012 with the 650M, i used to game for hours on end without noticeable throttling, so this is concerning.

P.S. this is for a CTO 2.5/1TB.
Click to expand...
Like what others said, Furmark is a stress-test and no games will run like Furmark. Furmark is essentially like Prime95 - just for stress testing and not much real world apps will run like them.
 
You don't even reach throttle temps. You need to rename furmark.exe to something else if you want to test gpu cooling because the GPU driver detects furmark.exe and throttles even before any temps would require it.
It is more accurate to just use games or 3Dmark.
 
I tried playing BF4, but as soon as I launch a 3D application it seems the GPU goes directly to 400 mhz.
 
That does not sound good.
I assume that is where it stays and you don't just look at the "right now" clock. It might just be that when you exit the game to check monitoring that it goes into power saving mode. I often just keep the monitoring app on the second monitor for that reason.
But now even GPU-z has the graph so that seems unlikely to be the probem. What do the temps say?

The 750M has about 15% overclocking headroom in games even on the MBP where Turbo mode is disabled (which would normally be 15% default). A newer GPU should have that much room to spare as well and not go on default clock right to throttling. That sounds quite like a serious problem.
Can you run some comparable benchmarks? Don't know if BF4 has a built in one.
 
I have this exact problem. Every game I try to play, I start off with great performance and then the card throttles itself. The weirdest thing about it is that the thermals are absolutely fine!!! nothing over 80C! WE EITHER HAVE DEFECTIVE COMPUTERS OR WE NEED DRIVER UPDATES!!!!
 
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You will find that it's not just the thermals, but also the fact that the Apple power supply just can't feed enough current to the laptop, this will also induce throttling.
 
Furmark and a GPU some accelerated BOINC apps have a lot in common... I've never killed a card with furmark nor the 1000+ hours of computational GPU apps. Furmark does a lot of memory shuffling within the card (from GPU to Mem and back)while running the card at full bore to keep the tech talk simple. This can increase the power draw quite a bit and will show instabilities almost instantly in terms of frequencies between those busses. What you're actually seeing and what some people already pointed out in the PSU limit being enforced by EFI. I have been trying to find some factual TDP numbers here as most sites say 75watts!!! but that has got to be a lie. I'd estimate more like 45-50 with the clocks being so low. So if you guys haven't guessed already, its gimped straight out of the box. It's throttle PREFCap Reason is Power limits not temps.

EDIT: also.. the CPU test on the notebookcheck benchmarks scores lower than a 3840QM? i..idk what to say on that one lol
 
I had exactly this same problem and it frustrated me to no end. I have resolved this issue on my 2014 mbp 2.3 doing 2 things.

1. doing the Full hardware scan at the "genius bar" - the quick built in one thats built into osx did not reveal my hardware issue.

The full scan determined that the aftermarket Samsung 830 pro ssd that I installed was not performing as expected through shotty driver support.

2. I replaced the ssd with the factory spindle drive.

Voila - no more throttling. I can now play vids and stream at the same time and no throttling. My temps never heated up past expected under heavy load. It never gave me any warnings on throttling. I had used a kext editor to adjust all the thermals up in the cpu and gpu steppings to obscene levels - no bueno on resolving the throttling issue. Every hardware test I threw at it looked and seemed fine. Transfer speeds for the burst drive tests were golden always. Sustained loads to the drive just triggered something in osx to throttle back transfer rates and it actually started clocking back the cpu AND gpu down to the 1/4 and 1/2 steppings.

It couldnt handle the power.
 
nspells154 said:
Do you think that apple will resolve this issue eventually? Even Notebookcheck.com has reported it during their review. Take a look about what they say under the gaming heading.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-Retina-15-Mid-2015-Review.144402.0.html
Click to expand...

WOW! The 950m would be the same performance jump over the m370x, that the m370x is over the old 750m. Really surprised Apple would choose such a lame card for this update, since the GPU was the only major update (aside from the trackpad).
 
inhalexhale1 said:
WOW! The 950m would be the same performance jump over the m370x, that the m370x is over the old 750m. Really surprised Apple would choose such a lame card for this update, since the GPU was the only major update (aside from the trackpad).
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that Apple is targeting the professional market, which does more computational tasks than gaming. For OpenCL computational tasks, AMD cards tend to perform better than NVIDIA ones.
 
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yjchua95 said:
Keep in mind that Apple is targeting the professional market, which does more computational tasks than gaming. For OpenCL computational tasks, AMD cards tend to perform better than NVIDIA ones.
Click to expand...

This is exactly why they chose AMD, I agree too.
 
I have not experienced throttling on my machine yet.
The most demanding game I've played for any notable length of time so far is XCOM, though.
 
yjchua95 said:
Keep in mind that Apple is targeting the professional market, which does more computational tasks than gaming. For OpenCL computational tasks, AMD cards tend to perform better than NVIDIA ones.
Click to expand...

Yep, this is spot on. The MacBook Pro isn't much of a gaming machine (at least for the price anyway). That's not to say it's incapable of playing games (if you purchase one for web development or video work and like to game a little on the side, it's certainly a nice little bonus) but it's not going to be ideal for extended, stressful workloads.

I've always though it would be cool if Apple brought back the 17" MacBook Pro with a slightly thicker base to accommodate a more robust cooling system / GPU. Now that they've moved away from the optical drive, they could probably do something really cool with all that extra space (e.g. the 17" model could sport dual GPUs or SSDs in a RAID configuration). It seems like their would be decent demand for such a model (give gamers a legitimate option, video professionals would likely find the SSD performance attractive and who wouldn't love something like a 17" 3840x2160 retina display).
 
Ovedius said:
I have not experienced throttling on my machine yet.
The most demanding game I've played for any notable length of time so far is XCOM, though.[/QUOTE

So if u were to launch your game with fraps (bootcamped) and just sit and don't move. The fps doesn't drop and then come back up?
Click to expand...
 
been playing batman Arkham City on the Mac side and have not experienced any degradation in performance, usually play for 30-60 min
 
yjchua95 said:
Keep in mind that Apple is targeting the professional market, which does more computational tasks than gaming. For OpenCL computational tasks, AMD cards tend to perform better than NVIDIA ones.
Click to expand...

Yes and no. If this were 100% true, then a switch back from AMD to NVIDIA would not have happened. Not saying the point you make about computational stuff isn't true, but if that were the driving reason behind GPU choice, why ever use NVIDIA graphics? I'm also not saying the m370x is a bad card, and it's an improvement over the 750m. It's just disappointing to see that Apple isn't choosing the best card, at that TDP, for a $2500+ laptop.
 
shoehornhands said:
Yep, this is spot on. The MacBook Pro isn't much of a gaming machine (at least for the price anyway). That's not to say it's incapable of playing games (if you purchase one for web development or video work and like to game a little on the side, it's certainly a nice little bonus) but it's not going to be ideal for extended, stressful workloads.

I've always though it would be cool if Apple brought back the 17" MacBook Pro with a slightly thicker base to accommodate a more robust cooling system / GPU. Now that they've moved away from the optical drive, they could probably do something really cool with all that extra space (e.g. the 17" model could sport dual GPUs or SSDs in a RAID configuration). It seems like their would be decent demand for such a model (give gamers a legitimate option, video professionals would likely find the SSD performance attractive and who wouldn't love something like a 17" 3840x2160 retina display).
Click to expand...
Yup, Workstation loads are much different than gaming loads. The Macbook pro is basically a workstation, not a gaming laptop. Although, I prefer gaming laptops as workstations to begin with.
 
ha1o2surfer said:
Yup, Workstation loads are much different than gaming loads. The Macbook pro is basically a workstation, not a gaming laptop. Although, I prefer gaming laptops as workstations to begin with.
Click to expand...
Each to his own.

I prefer a workstation laptop to begin with because I mainly do video rendering and editing on it, as well as using Autodesk software.

For gaming, all I need is just hook up my eGPU to it and start gaming (Sonnet IIID with GTX 780 Ti and RM450 PSU).
 
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