YouTuber Claims 15-Inch MacBook Pro With Upgraded Core i9 Chip is Severely Throttled Due to Thermal Issues

[dspdoc]

I just bought the 2018 i7. I wasn’t about to spend all that money on a i9. I think that’s just way too much horsepower in a laptop this size. There’s no way to properly cool it. That’s why Apple should have never even tried. One of their engineers should have piped up and said, “Hey dudes we can’t do this. This thing is either going to overheat or throttle like crazy. We will be called out.” That’s what I can’t get my head around. Don’t they have smarter people working for them? People with an ounce of common sense?

 

[Frank Dalton]

Jony Ive doesn't care if the machine works properly, just that it looks good while you update your Twitter feed at Starbucks.

 

[elijah.hoffman]

I can't believe Apple would push something so defective. This is some Lenovo-style crap. Waiting to see more tests.

Apple has pushed so much defective crap, it's pretty on par.

 

[IllIllIll]

That’s what I can’t get my head around. Don’t they have smarter people working for them? People with an ounce of common sense?

Why haven't you applied for the job?

 

[Frank Dalton]

One of their engineers should have piped up and said, “Hey dudes we can’t do this. This thing is either going to overheat or throttle like crazy. We will be called out.” That’s what I can’t get my head around. Don’t they have smarter people working for them? People with an ounce of common sense?

Why risk getting fired? Tim Cook set the tone when he kicked Scott Forstall out for butting heads with Jony Ive. Cook sent a clear message not to fight Ive, so you won't find any engineers speaking up anytime soon.

 

[ThatGuyInLa]

Your test is meaningless.

?? It’s my personal use case. It’s where and how my computer is used. That’s all that matters to me. As for the amount of throttling, seem within what I’ve experienced with other laptops.

 

[bkkcanuck8]

They’ll give some talking points to Rene Ritchie.

It will likely be brought up on the next MacBreak weekly hosted by Leo Laporte .... who has a pending order for the top of the line MacBook Pro... and is "a little concerned"...

 

[Evangeline]

This is good information. It's obvious Apple did all kind of basic testing and determined the thermal throttling was reasonable.

I'm not sure what other choices they had honestly. Between us pushing them for pro performance & faster upgrade cycles and Intel giving them a hot potato for a CPU, they did their best.

They could have upgraded the cooling system a bit though, I dunno, make it out of copper or make it bigger or something. Just a little bit, to let us know they care, you know?

 

[ThatGuyInLa]

I’m not exactly sure what you are working on there but looking at your charts it must be using hardware acceleration. The CPU usage is practically nothing most of the time. At the end of the second chart you can see the CPU usage go to 100% and you will notice that is right when the CPU frequency just tanks.

That’s the system sitting idle, then launching the render. Then it finishes. The app triggers the GPU switch as the app uses OpenGL for display. Also one chart is single core testing the other full. Single core will never report 100% CPU usage using that graph. Nearly all graphs are like this. You’d have to have a graph showing each core to get 100% (just for that core)

 

[stylinexpat]

Test it. Report back.

Will test and report back on new X1 Carbon it hates Chrome. I would have one tab open with nothing on it and it would show 9 open. Would also hog up memory and CPU usage. I think the MacBook with Safari things run properly.
Chrome alone would hog up 20% at minimum of the CPU usage with no tabs open. Open 8 tabs and it would show 21 tabs open and use 40-70% of CPU. After I uninstalled Chrome and restarted Laptop the CPU usage barely moved. At times it spiked up to 15% for no reason it seemed like.

Apple designs their computers with their OS and browsers to run at optimized performance. I look forward to getting my new MacBook Pro and returning this X1. Wanted to like it but it just has too many little bugs. The little vent on side blows out hot air with fan running like a little hair blow dryer.

 

[Frank Dalton]

I'm not sure what other choices they had honestly. Between us pushing them for pro performance & faster upgrade cycles and Intel giving them a hot potato for a CPU, they did their best.

No, they didn't. There are a thousand alternatives to this disaster. But they value form over function.
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Chrome alone would hog up 20% at minimum of the CPU usage with no tabs open

So... stop using Chrome?

 

[tyusrex]

I'm not sure what other choices they had honestly. Between us pushing them for pro performance & faster upgrade cycles and Intel giving them a hot potato for a CPU, they did their best.

They could have upgraded the cooling system a bit though, I dunno, make it out of copper or make it bigger or something.

The enclosure is just too small.

 

[0009827]

Apple always keeps fans as slow as possible until cpu is already too hot to cool down quickly once they spin up. SMC fan control should always be installed to change the insane defaults. But no surprise if the i9 is too much bang in such a thin laptop.

 

[dspdoc]

Why haven't you applied for the job?

Because I would be fired day one for speaking up about what most everyone on this thread is bitching about...

 

[tyusrex]

Why haven't you applied for the job?

Who the h wants to work for a company that's looking to sue and imprison it's own employees at every turn?

 

[JPack]

I'm not sure what other choices they had honestly. Between us pushing them for pro performance & faster upgrade cycles and Intel giving them a hot potato for a CPU, they did their best.

They could have upgraded the cooling system a bit though, I dunno, make it out of copper or make it bigger or something. Just a little bit, to let us know they care, you know?

Apple changed the material of the USB-C power adapter to plastic from metal for 2018.

Do you really think Apple would use an expensive copper heat sink like PC notebooks?

 

[BJonson]

For reference, here is my 2015 MacBook Pro (2.8GHz with turbo up to 4GHz, 16GB, Radeon M370X). I used Prime95 to load the CPU.

Notice that the 2015 MBP sees similar throttling. When all 4 cores (8 threads) are maxed out, the CPU can only operate at between 2.5-2.6GHZ which is 200MHz below the advertised speed.

LOL. That's exactly what my 2015 2.2ghz base model shows. So rule of thumb is get the lowest cpu speed model when buying macbook pro.

 

[brentsg]

Wondered how my 2015 i7 MBP held up to the Prime 95 torture test. It boosted immediately but couldn't hold it for more than a few seconds. After that it hovered around base clock, a little below, a little above for a while until the fan really got up to speed, then it hovered a little above base. Seems like all that is a reasonable expectation of how a laptop of the form factor should work.

Screenshot cropped at the right to take out where I stopped. I missed the boost in the screenshot but it was literally just a few seconds.

View attachment 771319

Which version? The recent versions that use AVX workloads are largely ignored by the PC enthusiast camp because the AVX instructions are crazy power hungry. That gang still uses version 2.66, I believe.

To provide some tangential data, I'm currently using an i7-8086K CPU that is absolutely at stock settings. In fact it was a pain in the ass to get it running at stock settings due to the desire for motherboard manufacturers to enhance things.

I'm currently running Prime95 (29.3 build 1) which uses AVX instructions. After a few minutes the max CPU temp is 64C, and the max CPU package power consumed is 110W.. and this is without the integrated GPU being utilized. Clocks at this time are all cores 4100MHz.

So basically, with extreme cooling I'm able to keep it under control.. 100MHz above the advertised base clock. But it's clearly exceeding the advertised 95W TDP without using integrated GPU, unless I'm missing something in how Intel specs this.

Running the exact same test using Prime95 2.66 (no AVX) and I'm at 4300MHz all cores, 60C, 85W TDP.

Edit: For clarity, my measured "TDP" is actually CPU package power, but there should be a very close relationship.

 

[zshane1125]

Here my results, ~5 min prime95 torture test.

i9
32GB
512SSD
560X

 

[Ploki]

Jony Ive doesn't care if the machine works properly, just that it looks good while you update your Twitter feed at Starbucks.

i hate people like you as much as people who update twitter feeds at starbucks; both of you guys bring equal amount to the conversation - 0
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Here my results, ~5 min prime95 torture test.

i9
32GB
512SSD
560X

now do 15

but honestly, this looks great. my 2012 does it a little better (0,1ghz above the base freq, but 0,1 below isnt bad at all.)

 

[pl1984]

They put the i9 in because they were receiving so much crap for not improving the MBP in a couple years. The chassis has barely been able support base i7's and graphics cards for a few generations now. To expect a single heatsink on both units with a tiny fan to keep them at operating temp is insane. They need to add thickness to their design for more cooling, and separate the damn heatsinks. Also, we should probably stop expecting a 1/2"+- laptop to run 18 cores and a graphics card.

I agree with you about the chassis not being able to provide adequate cooling I would like to point out the two parts have the same thermal rating.

 

[Ries]

Or by better and more responsive fan management. Too many questions. Too many people aimlessly theorising and blaming. Not enough answers. Patience is going to be how I handle this issue.

Properly won't make a difference, the fans should be at 100% after running the test for a while, if it isn't back up to base clock then, it will never be.

 

[Frank Dalton]

i hate people like you as much as people who update twitter feeds at starbucks; both of you guys bring equal amount to the conversation - 0

And, pray tell, how might your zero-tier contribution right here be any more valuable?

 

[project_2501]

I also claimed this with the 2017 nTB ... which was constantly throttling and the fans going crazy with the lightest of tasks... because of poor thermal design.

What was was the point of having super expensive high performance chips if you can'r use that power?

Apple is facing issue after issue after issue.

 

[tyusrex]

I agree with you about the chassis not being able to provide adequate cooling I would like to point out the two parts have the same thermal rating.

It's a combination of apple's enclosure being too small and Intel lying about their processor's specs.