Limiting Handbrake threads to prevent throttling on M2 MacBook Air

jeffgeerling.com

24 points·mikece··8 comments

At the risk of maybe burning something, you can thermally couple the heatsink to the chassis for better performance. LTT published a YouTube video a while back.

It ends up sending a lot of heat into the battery though, so probably isn’t the smartest idea unless you have some kind of external active cooling.

Just get a pro at this point. Killing the battery is not worth it

While profiling my desktop CPU, I can set performance targets to trade off power, temp, frequency across a selection of cores.

Can we do this with the M2? Is the technology here yet? To set a target of 85 instead of 105 degrees?

Casually glancing around, it doesn't seem like there are any easily accessible tools to do so on the M-series chips. The Intel chips in older Macs were a little more tunable since they were the same as the chips over on the Windows side.

I'm a little surprised the encode performance is ~10fps on x264. I don't know that much about the apple CPUs but I do remember a lot of news about how fast they were for media related tasks.

This was 4K with high presets, it's a lot faster when not throttling (18-20 fps), and well above real time when compressing 1080p.

Well it is a fanless laptop, I have to keep that in mind for comparisons haha.

I used the same preset on my R7 3700x which is not the fastest CPU by any means, and managed around 70fps. But I imagine power draw is a lot more than ~3x higher.

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