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Comment by aduitsis | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the point in the article mentioning the fans starting to spin at the drop of a hat: The macbook pro i9 16", albeit a fabulous device in almost every aspect, has a bug: Connecting an external monitor at QHD will send the discrete graphics card into >20W of power draw, whereas usually it's about 5W. At 20W for the graphics card alone, it's not difficult to see that the fans will be spinning perpetually.

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It gets worse—if you are charging the battery, you can immediately see the left or right side Thunderbolt ports get a lot hotter, fast. Probably because piping 96W through those ports heats things up a bit.

The thermal performance on the 2019 16" MacBook Pro is not wonderful.

How is that acceptable for a "pro" machine? I would expect that crap in a $100 Chromebook, not in a machine that starts at $1000+ just for the base model.

The 16" Macbook pro starts at $2,399!

With an i7

This problem is so infuriating. There was a thread the other day about it. It's clearly a bug, but it seems to be one that nobody wants to take responsibility for.

Why fix it now when it helps them vertically integrate?

The 1440p monitor issue seems like an especially bad bug. I run a 2160p monitor at a scaled HiDPI resolution (3008x1692) and never run into that. The discrete GPU idles at around 9W.

(Though also using a thunderbolt -> DisplayPort cable might be helping? Connecting over HDMI could exacerbate things).

I'm thunderbolt -> displayport on 1440p and I have eternal fans.

It's pretty baffling that it's not been solved really.

I know you're not going to like it, but you can make it go away by switching to a slightly lower resolution. So the external monitor will be doing the scaling. It's slightly fuzzy, but the quietness is golden.

Yip, same here, 4K is not affected, but QHD is.

Huh. I have Dell Latitude 5501 and it's almost always in hairdryer mode when connected to the dock (on which there's 1920x1200 HP Z24i and 2560x1440 Dell U2515H). Your description seems suspiciously similar.

Different graphics, though - MX150.

I've a Dell precision 5530 for work, absolutley roasting, continuously, even under no load. It's so bad, I'm switching to a mac book pro 16. Seems like out of the frying pan and into the fire for me!

I wonder if anyone who prefers to dock their laptop has thought about sticking it in a mini freezer under their desk

Condensation would likely be an issue which would need to be addressed.

ziplock bag and a silicon gel packet?

I don't think silica gel has the absorption capacity for this amount of water and the bag would be difficult to seal if you have cables for docking.

We clearly need to invent an over engineered system for condensation free freezing of an entire docked laptop, for science.

I pointed an air conditioner at mine for awhile and it definitely helped!

Though when I really want to avoid the fans I just disable the processor’s turbo boost. In my case that means the frequency never goes above 2.4GHz. For sustained workloads it doesn’t matter much since after boosting it’ll just throttle itself back to 2.4GHz or lower anyway.

Util for disabling turbo boost: http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com/

When I used to game on my 2012 macbook pro, I would rest the laptop on top of ice packs and change them every so often as they warmed. The case on aluminum macs acts as a heatsink so this was surprisingly effective. I was able to get my winter FPS during the heat of the summer this way.

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