MacBook Pro heat

Howdy. Recently got a new MacBook Pro 15, 32gig, i9, with Vega 20. When running Touch the bottom and top strip of the case get very hot; around 120F. Fans don’t seem to be straining. Apple replaced the machine once already and the new one is also heating up. They say it’s not normal, but has anyone had similar or acceptible behavior with this config? Thanks

As the proud owner of a new MacBook pro myself, I can comfortably say it’s performance is not what you’d expect for it’s price. I use it occasionally for touch stuff but, mostly as a last resort when I need to quickly test something out or sketch out a concept. The principal design objective was to make it thin at all costs. I wound up being able to squeeze decent performance out of it recently by running it in bootcamp and using an egpu (2080ti).

I’ve recently purchased a blade 15" with a 2080 as well. This computer is about 1.5 times as thick as the MBP, costs 25% less and easily has about 2-3x the performance headroom.

Some day apple might decide to make a mobile workstation like the retina books again. Until then I’d say that any heat/performance issues you might have while trying to do high performance graphics work on it are to be expected.

Hey there,

I’ve worked for almost 3 years now as a certified Apple technician. I’ve seen it all in terms of malfunctions and the inside/out of their machines. Unfortunately, Apple is more interested on making money than in offering a competitive high end product. Their price tag is insane and their specs are frankly way below what one would expect for such investment. The latest “pro” laptops have gorgeous circuit boards to look at, but are not designed to sustain continuous stress on their GPUs. The heating you experience is normal in terms of thermodynamics, since the inner body of the laptop simply cannot cope effectively with CPU/GPU heat, so there’s not much you can do on that end. Worst case scenario, you may experience deterioration on the soldering of the components on the long run. Usually the first thing to go wrong in the 2016-2018 series (besides the infamous keyboard) is the display, which glues off from the back of the lid and whose connector tends to get damaged. Since these models are the least modular you can imagine, any failure will result in replacement of the logic board, the top case or the display.

Thereby, I wouldn’t recommend Apple laptops to do more serious TD work. I do all my TD’ing in an Asus laptop, a fraction of the cost of a MacBook Pro and about 2-3 times more powerful. I do love my MacBook Pro 2014 for all my audio work, since Windows OS is truly horrible with all that Asio non-sense and connectivity to audio cards… but yeah, that’s audio.

Sorry for being the bearer of not so good news :frowning:

Hello,
I completely agree with it. Before I turned to TD I burned two MBP working with it for video editing (FCPX), compressing (Compressor) and playing (Isadora, Processing, Unity).
Even if you are very careful, cleaning often the fans and radiator, changing the thermal paste, putting it on a cooling support, you cannot avoid heat. The box is too tight and winding too weak.
I prolonger the life of one putting the motherboard in oven!
After turning to TD I bought a windows laptop (MSI GS65), not so nice, a little bit flimsy but with a real cooling and open air opening, half the price and double power. It make noise on load but the heating is acceptable.
And yes, for the sound, I continue to work on my MBP, on Windows its dreadful.

I think it’s cool and all that TD works on a mac, but totally not something I would ever use for anything real.

I build my own show-machines in windows because they perform best with TD. I love my mac and sometimes use TD on it to debug or find something in a network but never for very long.

I’ll never buy another new apple computer. It’s a huge waste of money, unless you think the fashion statement is worth the price.

It’s still possible to build a hackintosh with much better specs than anything they sell for much cheaper.

I Bought a Razer laptop for mobile TD dev and it is amazing. Highly recommend you sell your apple laptop and buy a Razer instead ASAP.

The i9 launched with thermal problems originally and was severely throttling back then, they did a fix for that so it doesn’t throttle severely but it much just run hotter then and probably slightly lower clock. That was all before they fitted that i9 model. In the end the i9 was not too much faster than the i7 max CPU because they thermals would not let the i9 stretch its wings.

Anyways, expect it to run hot, but also most thin and light laptops run extremely hot when using TouchDesigner and games. My Razor = super hot and loud, sure its 3 times more powerful, but its still extremely loud and hot, not able to work with it on “the lap” like the name laptop suggests. And its pretty much useless in meetings because its embarrassingly distracting when your laptop sounds like a drone about to take off :laughing:

There are some new 2019 thin laptops that have decent cooling and lower fan noise, but they are a rare breed. Look up reviews that measure noise if you are concerned with that aspect.

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Hey Ben,

can you tell me a little bit more about these rare breeds? I have binoculars with me at all time but I can’t seem to find them… I too had a Razer 15 with 1070 Max Q. Which I sent in because twice in a row the webcam just didn’t work anymore, not a big deal but I was able to get a full refund just before it got 1 year old. And with that money I bought a Razer 15 Advanced with 2070 Max Q. And this was toooo loud, sometimes very weird fan noise, sent it back directly.

So I am left here looking…