RSrspoerri·Sep 26, 2023
It's overheating and the (my) problems came from:
- loading the battery and powering the device
- high gpu power usage when plugging in a external monitor
- cpu power usage
- bad cooling which must be cleaned often
My recommendations:
Plug in the power from the right side. Afaik the thermal throttling kicks in sooner if you have it plugged in on the left.
Clean the device. Unfortunately it really sucks to open it. You will need special tools and lots of trust in the spaghetti monster that you dont break anything.
Cpu power usage can be lowered by using any of the tools:
https://github.com/sicreative/VoltageShift
https://volta.garymathews.com/ (most probably not working anymore)
Unfortunately in later updates apple prevented undervolting the cpu so it's (VoltageShift) use is limited now. But i was able to limit the power usage to 5W, which
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somehow helped keeping my device cooler. Be aware that you need to disable quite a lot of security measures to install Voltageshift.
Apparently having power saving active even when plugged in helps keeping the cpu and gpu cooler. I did not test this extensively because i switched to a m2.
A big problem comes from the gpu, if you have an external monitor plugged in, the video drivers start using 10W+ which causes problems when you are loading the battery as well. There are a lot of discussions on what causes the problems, it has to do with the drivers and some screens causing it to use way more power then needed. It can help to close the lid of the macbook while working with a external monitor.