Question about the new Macbook - Fan spinning - Eve Online

[robert.kreuels]

Hello,
I am interested into a 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB memory.

It is for my work, but I like to play EVE Online in my free time. Is it possible to play this game without a full spinning fan?

I don't like it, if my hardware gets hot. I know, Apple devices are not for gaming, but I like to play in my shot, short free time.

Greetings,
ROBERT KREULS

 

[Brookzy]

I cannot answer from experience, however in general these new MacBooks have the best cooling system of any MacBook Pro. I saw a YouTube video that claimed after encoding video for 15 minutes the fans only ramped up to half speed and were barely audible and it ran about 20-25 degrees Celsius cooler.

I have done some video encoding in my 13" and have the same experience - the fans are essentially inaudible.

You should be fine!

 

[lauramayer]

I cannot answer from experience, however in general these new MacBooks have the best cooling system of any MacBook Pro. I saw a YouTube video that claimed after encoding video for 15 minutes the fans only ramped up to half speed and were barely audible and it ran about 20-25 degrees Celsius cooler.

I have done some video encoding in my 13" and have the same experience - the fans are essentially inaudible.

You should be fine!

But if the fans are spinning, it's seems they started late. The MacBook is already warm/hot.

 

[LoopsOfFury]

It's fine if you leave the interval setting at one (the default) instead of immediate, and far quieter under all circumstances than the 2015 MBP with a Radeon R9 M370X.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hello,
I am interested into a 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB memory.

It is for my work, but I like to play EVE Online in my free time. Is it possible to play this game without a full spinning fan?

I don't like it, if my hardware gets hot. I know, Apple devices are not for gaming, but I like to play in my shot, short free time.

Greetings,
ROBERT KREULS

The fans are there to keep it cool when you push the performance eve online will push the performance it will get warmer and the fans will spin up as they are meant to do. If you don't want this then use a water cooled desktop all laptops will do this when you game on them simple as that.

 

[leman]

Is it possible to play this game without a full spinning fan? I don't like it, if my hardware gets hot.

The fan is there exactly to prevent your hardware from getting hot

If you are asking whether its somehow possible to reduce the performance of your computer so that it doesn't get hot while playing EVE — no, its not possible. And even if it were, your gaming experience would be horrible.

Just play the game normally and let the fan do it work. There is nothing wrong with your hardware getting hot. It was made to operate under load.

 

[keviig]

If you are asking whether its somehow possible to reduce the performance of your computer so that it doesn't get hot while playing EVE — no, its not possible. And even if it were, your gaming experience would be horrible.

Basically all games these days have "Half Vsync" (30hz lock), Vsync (60hz lock), framerate limiters and graphics settings in the options menu. Either of which will reduce load, meaning lower heat output and fan rpm. So that's false.
[doublepost=1484737651][/doublepost]

Hello,
I am interested into a 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB memory.

It is for my work, but I like to play EVE Online in my free time. Is it possible to play this game without a full spinning fan?

I don't like it, if my hardware gets hot. I know, Apple devices are not for gaming, but I like to play in my shot, short free time.

Greetings,
ROBERT KREULS

Depending on what fps you're getting now, reducing the fps limiter, setting either 30 or 60 hz Vsync and reducing graphics settings will reduce the load on the computer, thus reducing heat output and fan speed. It will get warm either way though, as the aluminium unibody acts as a heatsink.

 

[Banquo's Ghost]

I play EvE on my 2012 MacBook Pro and on my iMac 2016 5k Retina. Both will play the game very well on good settings. However, this is very dependent on situation and what you do in game. If you play in small groups for PvP or missions, you'll be able to use an MBP with no issue at pretty high settings. If you participate in big fleet battles, you'll need a really big beast to process all the information and almost everyone sets their computer to Performance settings (colloquially known as potato mode) for these fights.

Further, the Mac client runs under WINE and this adds overhead. Under Bootcamp, all is more streamlined with the Windows client.

However, the game will always need to use the dGPU and thus you will get fans running. On my 2012 MBP on potato, the fans barely run unless there are many ships in grid. On full quality 1440 resolution, the fans run all the time, but not excessively and I would expect the throttle to kick in if there was a danger of overheating.

 

[leman]

Basically all games these days have "Half Vsync" (30hz lock), Vsync (60hz lock), framerate limiters and graphics settings in the options menu. Either of which will reduce load, meaning lower heat output and fan rpm. So that's false.

Even if you limit your framerate, using the GPU APIs will put your GPU in a high-power state. You might be able to reduce the power consumption of the GPU somehow (even though I want to see tests on this first), but you are not going to prevent the card from getting hot or the fan from spinning up.

 

[keviig]

Even if you limit your framerate, using the GPU APIs will put your GPU in a high-power state. You might be able to reduce the power consumption of the GPU somehow (even though I want to see tests on this first), but you are not going to prevent the card from getting hot or the fan from spinning up.

GPU's these days don't just have a low and high power state. They have numerous states (clock speeds and voltages) depending on the work load.

Asking the card to run at 75% load may even cut the power consumption in half, due to lower clock speeds and thus lower voltages.
Remember that power consumption= Capacitance*Frequency*voltage squared (P=C*F*V^2).
So a slight reduction in voltage can have a great effect on power and thus heat.

This is why the mobile AMD cards have more cores and less frequency than their desktop counterparts.

Radeon Pro 460 (mobile): 16 cores, 910MHz, 1.8 TFLOPS, 35W TDP
RX 460 (desktop): 14 cores, 1200 MHz, 2.2 TFLOPS, 75W TDP

Here you see a roughly 20% decrease in performance (TFLOPS), while TDP is cut in half.

Regardless of this, the dGPU will put out a decent amount of heat while gaming, so the Mac will get hot.

 

[leman]

@keviig: your post raises a lot of points to which I would like to reply in detail, but I don't really want to derail this thread. Basically, let me just say that I am sceptical. I doubt very much that the GPU will have long enough idle states for the power controller to lower the clocks significantly, even at 30 FPS. I can imagine that frame limiting is useful for very fast GPUs, which can compute your frame in 2ms and then spend the rest 20ms or so idling. Lower-end GPUs just don't have that luxury. So yes, you might observe some minor energy savings when limiting your frames on a slower GPU like the Polaris 11, but I very much doubt that it will substantially lower the chip's temperature. And I also doubt that the chip will clock lower than its core clock in any case, when an OpenGL context is active.

Again, I am not claiming that I am correct here — its simply my guess based on my experience and knowledge of GPUs. I think one should just try it out and see if it makes a difference. I would love to be proven wrong here honestly, because that would open some interesting possibilities.

P.S. In fact, I can imagine that frame limiting is probably more noticeable on the CPU side, because the CPU will need to perform substantially less work preparing the data for the GPU. And CPUs are really good at changing their power states these days.