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M5 Pro coil whine from GPU

K

Kelchhut

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Has anyone with the new M5 Pro or M5 Max MacBook Pros also noticed coil whine, especially under GPU load?

I just noticed a faint electrical noise while running a local LLM. I'm not sure if it's normal since the M5 Pro MacBook Pro is my first MacBook Pro.
 
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jabbr said:
that's just the natural sound of AI accelerators generating slop
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Ok thx. And how common is this with MacBook Pros? With some LLMs I can hear it quite clearly even when I'm just sitting normally in front of the laptop. Should I return it within the 14-day window and hope that a replacement unit will be better, or will it most likely be the same there as well?
 
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Kelchhut said:
Has anyone with the new M5 Pro or M5 Max MacBook Pros also noticed coil whine, especially under GPU load?

I just noticed a faint electrical noise while running a local LLM. I'm not sure if it's normal since the M5 Pro MacBook Pro is my first MacBook Pro.
Click to expand...
M5 Max (40gpu) 128GB with no noticeable coil whine under heavy machine learning, llm training loads. Have heard the fans kick on, which was different from the M4Pro, never heard the fans on that one. The M5 sits in a stand behind my monitor. Me sitting 3 feet away with a big monitor in between my conceal any minor coil whine. I have seen YT vids mentioning coil whine on the M5s and have been paying more attention, but none so far.
 
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Just got a M5 Pro 16 inch Macbook Pro and i hear coil whine when using Ableton Live with a big session running at 128 samples. Higher samples give less to very little noise.
 
It's kinda like tinnitus level. If you're in a really quiet level you definitely hear it. Solution is just to switch to 1024 samples, or move the macbook further away if you use a monitor.
I haven't used Logic Pro but i suspect it handles the CPU better. I need to test it further. Ableton always seems less optimized than Logic to me for some reason.
It does suck. I come from a M1 pro macbook pro too. That being said, it's 2.3X times faster, in the same chassis and with zero fan noise, which is incredible. We can't have it all...
 
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Ascn said:
All generations of the Mx-Pro and Max Chips have this behavior.
How audible is it? What is your exact machine?
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Hasn't been the case for me.

My M1 Max is plugged into a 1500 VA UPS and has never made an audible coil whine sound. It is ~1.5 ft in front of me on a work desk in my super quiet basement corner office.

Nothing of the sort emanates from my M3 Pro 14" MPB either.
 
@bontempi apple silicon has a perplexing and wonderful quality where smaller buffer sizes can give more stability and performance. I would be pretty upset if I had to switch to a higher buffer because of coil whine, not only for the higher latency but worse performance. Does your M5 whine @ 32 samples?
 
Did a few more tests with Ableton. I'm running a big session at 96khz with lots of plugins so it's kind of a worst case scenario. At 512 there's a whine but it's very quiet. It gets worse at each lower value. I can't run the session at 32, only 64.

At 48 khz, the whine pretty much disappears at 256 samples.

The whine gets an octave lower each time you lower the samples number.

Using the demo session from Ableton Live, the whine is clearly lower than my big session. I can play it at 32/48khz and 64/96khz.

EDIT : just did a test with Logic Pro and the macbook is nearly silent while happily playing 27 instances of Serum 2 @ 96khz / 32 samples

Which confirms Logic Pro is much better optimized than Ableton.
 
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Can you hear the coil whine during normal operation of the laptop?
So during web browsing, etc.?
 
edubfromktown said:
Hasn't been the case for me.

My M1 Max is plugged into a 1500 VA UPS and has never made an audible coil whine sound. It is ~1.5 ft in front of me on a work desk in my super quiet basement corner office.

Nothing of the sort emanates from my M3 Pro 14" MPB either.
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That's a good point. Maybe mine does not make any coil whine because it is plugged into a cyberpower 1500 with a true sine output. I believe all Macs suffer when connected to a simulated sine wave power source.
 
teh_hunterer said:
Given these things can draw essentially twice as much power as the M3 Pro, I'm not entirely surprised to see coil whine.
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Just encountered the M5 Max coil whine today. I think you are right about the power draw - if I switch my battery to low power mode, the coil whine immediately goes away.
 
teh_hunterer said:
Given these things can draw essentially twice as much power as the M3 Pro, I'm not entirely surprised to see coil whine.
Click to expand...
Even my M3 Pro produces a very faint coil whine after sustained heavy loads. I can only hear it in extremely quiet spaces and it only lasts a few seconds. Compare that to my work PC that snaps, crackles, and pops like a bowl of Rice Crispies.
 
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