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YouTuber says insufficient cooling causes performance throttling in i9-powered MacBooks


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The updated laptops are aimed at professionals

 

 

In brief: Apple finally updated its MacBook Pros recently, offering models with 8th generation, 6-core i7 and i9 Intel CPUs. But a YouTuber is suggesting that the 15-inch laptop doesn’t provide enough cooling for the latter chip, and that performance is throttled excessively to compensate.

Dave Lee made the claims on his tech-focused YouTube channel. He says the 2.9GHz processor has limited performance due the MacBook’s design, with thermal throttling kicking in quickly.

Lee says an i9-powered MacBook running Adobe Premier Pro showed very serious throttling after just a few seconds, dropping the average clock on load to around 2.2GHz.

"This i9 in this MacBook can't even maintain the base clock speed," Lee said. "Forget about Turbos and all that stuff, it can't even maintain the 2.9GHz base clock, which is absurd. This CPU is an unlocked, over-clockable chip, but all of that CPU potential is wasted inside this chassis, or more the thermal solution that's inside here."

Lee went on to show Premier Pro render times that revealed a 2017 MacBook Pro with an i7 can outperform the new i9 model by four minutes, rendering a clip in 35 minutes. A Windows laptop—Gigabyte’s Aero 15X—can do the job in just over 7 minutes, though he does point out that Adobe Premiere isn’t as well optimized for MacOS as it is for Windows.

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Lee also demonstrated the thermal issues by running the same test in a freezer. It dropped the i9 MacBook’s render time down from 40 minutes to 27 minutes, which suggests Apple's thermal solution isn’t doing a very good job.

It’s worth remembering that the tests were carried out by one person using a single, unoptimized app, so we’ll have to wait and see if further examinations show similar results before drawing any solid conclusions.

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The MacBook Pro, as the name suggests, is a laptop aimed at professionals. Or at least, it was. The price is high, but in return you expect to get unrivaled performance in a portable package. With the 2018 MacBook Pro, it looks as though Apple has taken a step too far by offering a Core i9 15-inch model without any consideration of the cooling such a high performance chip requires.

 

As ExtremeTech reports, the Core i9 processor Apple chose to use inside the MacBook Pro (i9-8950K) has a base clock frequency of 2.9GHz, which is capable of bursting up to 4.8GHz when necessary. However, testing carried out by YouTuber Dave Lee makes it clear the Core i9 can't even maintain 2.9GHz, let alone 4.8GHz. In fact, it ends up running at 2.2GHz due to the heat generated inside the chassis forcing it to throttle.

 

You may be thinking, "but it's still a very fast laptop, right?" but that's clearly not the case. The thermal throttling is so severe this Core i9 model ends up taking longer to complete tasks than older generation processors. Lee used Adobe Premier Pro as an example, pitting the Core i9 MacBook against a 2017 MacBook Pro using an older Kaby Lake chip with fewer cores. The older laptop was faster by 11 percent!

 

This isn't a problem with Intel's Core i9, it's Apple's thermal solution. Apple is a company laser-focused on design and offering the thinnest, most beautiful laptops to the detriment of just about everything else. In this case it's cooling that's insufficient, and it means the Core i9 is completely wasted inside the MacBook Pro.

 

It gets worse, though, as the problem isn't just limited to the Core i9 model. NotebookCheck tested the 2018 MacBook Pro which ships with the Core i7-8850H and experienced similar throttling problems. It remains slightly faster than the 2017 MacBook Pro running a Core i7-7700HQ, but the gap diminishes the more you use the laptop as the heat increases.

 

What's most frustrating about this for new MacBook Pro owners is, Apple either didn't test the thermals thoroughly enough in these new Pros, or it did and decided the reduced performance was acceptable. Neither of those are acceptable when Apple expects you to pay upwards of $2,399 for the Pro and $2,799 if you want a Core i9.

 

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LOL mostly rich people use macbooks if it blows up they can buy something else.  Us poor folks use Winders and Linux  :lol: 

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A lot of people I KNOW use MACS for the GLAM factor.. Irks me that they can afford to buy expensive laptop yet are unwilling to buy a Legit copy of OFFICE, PHOTOSHOP or PREMIERE..

 

 

 

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11 minutes ago, teodz1984 said:

A lot of people I KNOW use MACS for the GLAM factor.. Irks me that they can afford to buy expensive laptop yet are unwilling to buy a Legit copy of OFFICE, PHOTOSHOP or PREMIERE..

 

 

 

I only know one person that bought a MAC  it's my nephews wife and he told  me he couldn't stand it and he graduated from like 5 years of  collage  to work on PCs  . The Desktop marketshare shows there just luxury items for the the rich and women like them because there shinny  .

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Added value by merging threads 

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1 hour ago, Crazycanuk said:

Added value

The best value-added there is here.  :flowers:

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