Ugh, really starting to be stressed out here, just returned me 5600m for a 5500m

[darnovo]

I just returned my 5600m MacBook Pro 16” as I felt like $4200 on a laptop was just too much money and got a 5500m instead. Now it’s noticeably hotter than my 5600m and I’m just installing Big Sur and the fans are at 100%. Now I’m reading the 5500m’s have all sorts of issues with the fans and heat and I’m regretting returning my old machine at all

is there any fix, am I stuck, do I need to return this again and go back to the 5600m or what?

or go windows at this point mayhaps

 

[ght56]

The 5500M 16-inch runs a lot hotter than the 5600M 16-inch, and it is especially pronounced when using external displays or apps that rely heavily on the discrete GPU. As far as I know, there is no fix to this. (That said, the fans going peak when doing an OS install are not surprising.)

 

[chrfr]

I use a 16" with the 4GB 5500M all day long with an external display attached and do not find it to be objectionably noisy unless I'm on a Zoom call or when running a virtual machine that's using a lot of CPU.
With that said, unless I had an absolute need for an Intel powered Mac laptop, I would not buy a 16" at all at this point.

 

[arche3]

5600m. Or wait for 16 m1x model

 

[dinobear]

5600m gpu is also a lot more powerful than the 5500.

 

[Maxwells_Equations]

why the frig would u return a 5600m for the 5500m?

 

[x3sphere]

There's no fix for the heat and noise issues associated with the 5500 / 5300M GPU.

You either:

Go back to 5600M
Get an eGPU (I had a 16", and this brought the fan noise down to a normal level)
Get the M1 13"

I have moved to an M1 MBP since and the fan doesn't even spin up at all most of the time. Even while running a ton of things simultaneously, Zoom, dozens of Chrome tabs, and VS Code + Docker. It's incredible really, if you can deal with going down to a 13" and having only 16GB RAM. I notice no downgrade in performance from my 16", if anything it's slightly faster in some tasks.

 

[nikhsub1]

The M1 13" is amazing. I retired my late 2016 15" as the keyboard is literally unusable it's so broken/falling apart. I have a 24" second monitor at my desk the the 13" is fine for me - I will be getting the 16" though when it's available. The CPU/GPU is quite remarkable. I have yet to hear a fan at all and the battery life is amazing. I did buy some x86 hardware though that I will need to run my VM's.