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If you follow the gaming notebook forums much at all you'll see that the 6-core 8th gen chips are very difficult to cool properly even in much thicker frames than the MacBook Pro offers. Seriously, the Notebookreview forums are full of people upset that monstrous gaming notebooks aren't able to cool these chips properly, especially if there's a discrete GPU also pumping heat into the system.

As soon as I saw that these Macs had been released with these new CPUs I started wondering what kind of cooling magic Apple might have worked to make it possible. The answer seems to be: none. The laws of physics are the laws of physics and if these chips run hot in 1"+ thick systems with massive heatsinks and fans, what chance do they have in something as thin as a MacBook Pro?

The thing is these MacBooks were designed for quad core i7s not hexacore i9s. I think this situation is similar to what happened with the 2011 MacBook Pros that had the Core 2 Quads and discrete GPUs. They had originally been designed for the Core 2 Duos. I think the extra heat from the CPUs was what caused the Radeons to keep failing in those.
 
To be fair, this isn't so much Apple's fault as it is Intel's. Intel has really dropped the ball in the past couple of years. If they don't right the ship soon, AMD will take over the CPU game for a while. They are late with everything and are having lots of trouble shrinking the dies.
Wait, Intel designed the chassis, chose to offer that i9 as a $300 upgrade, and came up with the thermal solution?

To be fair, this could simply be a defective laptop/chip/paste application and a regular i9 could run cooler than a polar bear's toenails. Or it could be overly aggressive throttling because a 6-core chip might need more room to breathe. But to back the bus up and park the wheels firmly on Intel...
 
Wait, Intel designed the chassis, chose to offer that i9 as a $300 upgrade, and came up with the thermal solution?

To be fair, this could simply be a defective laptop/chip/paste application and a regular i9 could run cooler than a polar bear's toenails. Or it could be overly aggressive throttling because a 6-core chip might need more room to breathe. But to back the bus up and park the wheels firmly on Intel...

I'm talking about Intel failing at shrinking the die. If these were 10nm parts this probably would not be happening! This is what the 4th 14nm gen? Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake. They've hit a road block.

I hope Cannon Lake and Ice Lake arrive sooner than later.
 
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Hasn't this been an age-old problem? I've seen YouTubers show how to redo the thermal paste on other MacBooks to get better cooling/performance.

Edit: I use iStat Menus to permanently keep my late 2013 13" rMBP at max fan speed, and doing light activities I frequently see core CPU temps up to 187. Have seen it go up to 212 F.

I actually used an infrared thermometer on my powerbrick the other day that gets super hot. It was 169 F.

That would be 86, 100, 76 degrees Celsius respectively. Hot for light work, even in those real units :cool:

Unfortunately the throttling was already expected/feared already for tbe i9 if one wasn‘t a true believer. Sad if it turned out to be true now, anyway.

He might just be located in the wrong country/state, though, living it wrong.
 
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I can't believe Apple would push something so defective. This is some Lenovo-style crap. Waiting to see more tests.

It seems like Apple could use a Quality Assurance department. Because whatever they have now is not acceptable. I've been a QA Engineer for 25 years and it seems the level of defects and bugs is unacceptable for a company of this stature.
 
Macbook Pro needs a redesign ASAP.
The touchbar gimmick was totally useless and the awful butterfly keyboard was a disaster in both MacBook Pro and 12” Macbook.

I don’t understand why Apple is so stubborn and refuse to accept they messed up.

They are doing great with iPads and iPhones,Watch and Airpods etc but when it comes to Macbooks they have really lost the plot.
 
Dave Lee is not some random guy. His claim warrants further investigation.
Yes, it does - it is still early on.

The thermal camera he was using was not showing unusually high temperatures - so I wonder the current OS is not being overly conservative.

I would wait for a site like Anandtech to review it. You also have to compare it against other computers using the same chip (which I don't think is the chip that is in the current batch of Windows computers). You might find maybe the chip itself is overstating the performance. It could be that the chip requires an overly aggressive fan solution to work properly.

The professionals that they had brought in -- seemed to be happy with it... but either way -- best to wait a couple weeks before jumping the gun.
 
Others are countering that the throttling is not thermal related and that Premiere is unoptimized for the i9. I don't even have a 2018 MacBook i9 but I'm going to chill (no pun intended) and let the experts check this out. Hopefully, it results in future MacBook Pros getting much improved cooling. As the owner of a former flagship MacBook Pro, I can attest to it really sucking when your CPU throttles.
 
Wait, Intel designed the chassis, chose to offer that i9 as a $300 upgrade, and came up with the thermal solution?

To be fair, this could simply be a defective laptop/chip/paste application and a regular i9 could run cooler than a polar bear's toenails. Or it could be overly aggressive throttling because a 6-core chip might need more room to breathe. But to back the bus up and park the wheels firmly on Intel...

Apple tends to apply the paste rather liberally from what I've seen which is as bad as applying to little. Impossible to know without removing the heatsink but risking the warranty on a less than one week old machine is not something many people would want to do.
 
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Facts don't care about your feelings.

The Intel Core i9-8950HK is a high-end processor for laptops with six cores based on the Coffee Lake architecture and was announced early 2018. The processor clocks at between 2.9- 4.8 GHz (4.3 GHz with 6 cores) and can execute up to twelve threads simultaneously thanks to Hyper-Threading. The 4.8 GHz can only be reached using the "Thermal Velocity Boost" which allows one core to boost to 4.8 GHz (+200 MHz) as long as the CPU temperature is below 50°C. Multiple cores can be boosted +100 MHz below 50°C.
 
To be fair this guy is a colossal winer who makes a living attacking apple now.

C'mon guys USE YOUR HEADS!
i disagree, just found his channel like last week and he make some really good points.

and why are you guys surprised. apple didn't redesign the chassis, and the thing was alrdy getting toasty from a 4 core, how do you think a 6 core is gonna manage.

you don't have to be a apple hater to have some common sense
 
That’s why this segment made me roll my eyes at the time. Phil Schiller trying to up sell the MBP as an alternative to the Mac Pro. (Because they were arguably still thinking of dropping Mac Pros entirely back then).

Can you imagine telling your client you’re gonna deliver their edit late because your workstation is throttling? :D

 
I'm talking about Intel failing at shrinking the die. If these were 10nm parts this probably would not be happening! This is what the 4th 14nm gen? Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake. They've hit a road block.

I hope Cannon Lake and Ice Lake arrive sooner than later.
That has nothing to do with this though. Bringing an unprompted, unrelated issue into a topic just to - to do what actually? That's pretty much deflection.
 
It’s early days yet. Let’s hold off with the pitchforks and tar until we see if any more similar reports surface. The dude could just have gotten a clunker.

Of course, the Fanbois who love their meta commentary should also hold off until more time has passed. It’s early days yet, so you might want to wait a bit before telling this dude that he’s just holding it wrong. :p
 
It seems like Apple could use a Quality Assurance department. Because whatever they have now is not acceptable. I've been a QA Engineer for 25 years and it seems the level of defects and bugs is unacceptable for a company of this stature.

What gets me is that for several months now, since these 6-core CPUs were first released, folks on the PC side have been screaming about how hot and prone to throttling they are in things like 10lb 17" Alienware notebooks.

Not to pick on Alienware, that's just one particularly bad example. The Notebookreview forums are overflowing with people talking about repasting and undervolting all manner of machines to try and tame these CPUs, because a bunch of OEMs saw fit to shoehorn them into existing designs.

For real, the minute I saw that Apple had updated the machines without making any changes to accommodate the additional heat, I just shook my head. I've been considering buying a gaming notebook and retiring my desktop, since mobile GPUs are so capable now, but reading one horror story after another about 8th gen CPUs thermal throttling even in massive gaming notebooks has convinced me to wait maybe another generation.

But if Alienware can't properly cool an 8950HK in a 17", 10lb, 1" thick monster, how the heck can Apple expect it to do anything but choke in something like the 15" MacBook Pro chassis?
 
Isn't the entire point of the "turbo boost" on these Intel CPUs to allow the CPU to run at a higher than rated clock speed for shorter periods, then throttle down to the "regular" speed once the thermal threshold is reached?

IE, it's working as designed?
 
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I remember my 2011 MBP would run really freaking hot as it was a first-gen quad-core MBP. My 2012 was a lot better. It’s the only time I’ve upgraded a Mac in a year, lol. My next best record is three years. But then the rMBP had the crap LG display with image retention but at least Apple fixed that with a swap to a Samsung display after a quick round trip through their repair center in Austin, TX.
 
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I’m no expert and this is one example, but it’s a shame if Apple is responsible for this. Just another reason to switch to your own processors in my eyes. Tech will continue to become thinner and lighter, you’ll need end to end control to do this.
 
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