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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

I love MacBooks and Mac machines however they aren't cut out for specialised work.

I have a M4 Max with 128 GB RAM. If I play Civ VI (a game released in 2016) on it for a few hours without limiting the FPS it will heat up till it turns itself off.

It's not cut out for heavy loads consistently like games or crypto mining. It's cut out for a heavy loads like Xcode compiling for a few minutes then back to editing text.

My gaming machine which has poorer performance (in fps terms) and is equipped with AMD 3700 and a 2080 Super can play Civ VI indefinitely without breaking a sweat.

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Couple of things: This must be new to the M4? I've played Civ VI for hours and hours on an M1 Max without issue.

If someone is looking at this Nvidia box, they're likely fine with a desktop footprint, in which case they'd be looking at the Mac Studio which should not have any thermal issues whatsoever. I'm guessing you're on a laptop?

If they are insistent on a laptop format, you can alleviate overheating issues pretty easily with some thermal pads and running the laptop on a cooling base when you're running heavy operations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHo5y9Los

That's pretty surprising and breaks my mental model of how these chips perform. Do you think that's because they don't have the raw FLOPs, something inefficient in the Apple/Metal rendering pipeline, something about Civ VI and how it was converted (i.e. x86 or DirectX emulation), or something else entirely?

I've had no trouble with a (base) M4 mini for regular dev work, though I compile remotely and haven't played any games on it.

FWIW I also just started seeing comments from other devs on my team today about their M4 mini's thermally shutting down during a compile run in Android Studio frequently.

Shocking to say the least imo.

Did you change the fan settings? Default is for fans to be quiet. If you go to energy management in settings you can choose “more power” or something instead of automatic. Your Mac will be louder but throttle less.

I’m curious if Civilization VII has the same issue. Baldur’s Gate 3 was released around the same timeframe as Civ 6 and has some pathological behavior on higher-core-count machines.

They’re not playing civ vi. They’re using the gpu and memory exclusively. When I’m running deepseek on my M1 Max it barely heats up.

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