M4 / M4 Pro fan noise

[ThomasFlips]

Recently i acquired a mbp 14inch M4 with 24gb ram. I installed a BUNCH of audiosoftware in total silence but when i was re-analysing my 600gb music library with traktor4 pro, meanwhile also playing some music, it sounded like a jet engine. I do suspect traktor to be the culprit, not making adequate use of resources thus overusing some. My mac is elevated 30cm so that airflow can always do its thing. I was surprised about the noise my fancy new machine spat out. Never heard it since.

 

[Makisupa Policeman]

M3 / M3 Pro is going be a bit less power hungry and more efficient than M4 with similar performance—blowing away any intel machine at the very least. If you’re worried about fan noise mine typically only come on when doing pretty heavy CPU tasks that max out all the cores, or doing multiple huge sync/backup tasks at once. Even when they come on they’re barely audible compared to the jet engines on Intel!

 

[throAU]

M3 / M3 Pro is going be a bit less power hungry and more efficient than M4 with similar performance

Nope.

M4 on low power mode will be almost as fast or faster than m3 on full power.

 

[Makisupa Policeman]

Nope.

M4 on low power mode will be almost as fast or faster than m3 on full power.

Yeah I hadn’t considered the benefit of low power mode for that. My only issue with running in it constantly is that you lose 120 refresh and cloud syncing is automatically paused or optimized. But fair point nonetheless.

 

[throAU]

Yeah I hadn’t considered the benefit of low power mode for that. My only issue with running in it constantly is that you lose 120 refresh and cloud syncing is automatically paused or optimized. But fair point nonetheless.

M4 max on auto (inc 120hz) in a 14" chassis is silent 90% of the time, only when pushing hard to run games and stuff the M3 will struggle with do they come on.

For my daily workload i have forgotten to turn off high power mode on a regular basis when i've used it briefly to speed up local LLM queries, etc.

I've run for days/weeks on high power mode (again, 14" chassis, m4 max with 40 gpu cores and 16 cpu cores) and not heard the fan in normal use.