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I'm toasted. My long-awaited purchase disappoints me extremely.

I'm a quietness-freak. One of the main reasons to get Macbook Pro 15" 2.8, R9 M370X was Apple's tendency to keep hardware hot but quiet, and it's speakers.

Despite that the fans on it are mad. While you're using CPU only it's about "ok", but I had to undervolt and limit the TDP to ~35W to make the noise about reasonable. Speeds are down. Temps - 50-60C on idle, up to 80-85 on load.

When R9 M370X is involved performing even lightest things it goes insane though. GPU may simply be active but doing nothing, I play YT video and fans ramp up to 50% while CPU is no more than 70C and GPU ~65C.

So, 1-st problem - fans start to be much more aggressive when dGPU is on. When I do something (even lightest) in Cinema 4D it may be ~65C CPU and ~60 GPU it goes full blast. Than at least a minute after I stopped working it goes on before calming down. Even when it's 55C already it still goes.

So, second - fan speeds are much excessive and aren't adequate to temps.

Than I tried MacsFanControl (TG Pro, doesn't matter) to lower the speeds. Despite I managed to get ~70-80C on load a minute later CPU went 800ghz flat! And nothing makes it speed up, I have to give the control back to system, it spins 6000rpm for a couple of minutes and than recovers. In Windows it's the same.

So, third problem - inadequate and unavoidable artificial throttling.

I'm getting mad. I can't bare this noise. Even lightest photo editing in C1 makes it shout out loud despite it's pretty cool, not speaking of C4D which is my main tool.

Fans are clean, paste is new (MX-4) Is this a normal for this model? Does 2014 GT 750M does the same? How to f*** make it work silently, or at least reasonably?

Help me please. It doesn't give the performance nor comfort I bought it for, I'm so sad...

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  • First, this entire post sounds like a long rant which will probably get it down voted and/or closed. Secondly, there are a ton of MacBook Pro models that fall under A1398. Which one do you have specifically? Finally, fans come on to cool your Mac. If you want complete silence with performance, you bought the wrong product - you need a desktop with much more efficient cooling.
    – Allan
    May 28, 2020 at 18:30
  • I'm very depressed by this, so yes, it's emotional... The model is MJLU2LL/A*, I described the specs in the beginning. I don't expect total silence when I render with 100% cpu and gpu, but the noise must be reasonable - at least, fans shouldn't spin so much more than it's needed to keep it around 80C.
    – Andrew Orlow
    May 28, 2020 at 18:43
  • Yikes - lots to unpack. Don’t fret if this gets down votes. The site for a very long time had a very strict - one question per question policy. It’s a little looser, but people may react poorly to long posts. If you don’t get good answers, please pick the most important first question and post it as briefly as you can - expecially when you can post it without being too emotionally involved. Sometimes emotion in a post helps, since we all empathize to pain and frustration. As long as you’re kind to others, it’s totally OK to be upset or long winded with yourself if that helps.
    – bmike ♦
    May 28, 2020 at 21:05
  • "Fans are clean, paste is new (MX-4)" Did you DISASSEMBLE THE MAC TO INSPECT THE THERMAL PASTE? Interesting. Stop installing fan software, too, you need to control your variables. If it isn't working right, call Apple before you break something,
    – geoO
    May 29, 2020 at 3:17
  • Of course I did Apple wouldn't help me, I'm out of warranty for 5 years :D
    – Andrew Orlow
    May 29, 2020 at 16:18

1 Answer 1

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I understand how frustrating this can be when you set your expectations and they don't quite line up with what reality is giving you.

In my comments, I stated "If you want complete silence with performance, you bought the wrong product - you need a desktop with much more efficient cooling." I know you're not expecting complete silence, but you've got the wrong product for the job you're asking the machine to do. Here's why...

The most top of the line MacBook Pro from 2015 comes with an Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a discrete GPU, an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2 GB of dedicated VRAM

The GPU VRAM recommendations from Maxon Cinema 4D for the for the Cinema 4D R21 and S22 is 4GB.

We recommend at least 4 GB VRAM for GPU rendering

So, the Mac that you've selected only has half of the minimum recommendation for this particular piece of the software. You Mac has no other choice other than choice but to spin up fans to cool off due to the extreme load they now have to deal with.

So, yes, these are problems, but unfortunately, it's not a problem with your Mac nor can it be fixed. Unfortunately, the 2015 MacBook Pro is not the right fit for your particular need.

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  • Actually those numbers are pretty arbitrary. I work also on old HP laptop with GT635m and 2GB vram and it works fairly nicely. The question is a load gpu takes. I can get when it wrecks if the load is huge, but when I only rotate a single cube - that's virtually nothing - this must not happen. There's something very wrong but I can't discover what
    – Andrew Orlow
    May 28, 2020 at 23:46
  • I can only give you what is empirically available. Anecdotal scenarios of "a single cube" here or there is not a debate I'm going to engage in because I can't and don't have "hands on your machine." You've presented symptoms, I've given you the reasons, but you want to contradict what I've posted from the dev.
    – Allan
    May 29, 2020 at 0:04

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