Prior to purchasing my MacBook Pro 16 inch I had read online that the thermal cooling combined with the powerful CPU amounted to excessively noisy fans. This was concerning to me since the main function of my laptop is to do music recording. I was worried that if I had the laptop connected to external monitors and running recording software that the fans would kick in and make it difficult to get good quality recordings when using a mic. I didn’t want to be in a situation where I was recording vocals or acoustic instruments and have the take be ruined by the fans kicking on.
I decided to purchase the MacBook Pro to test the fan noise. After installing all my music software I test drove the laptop with Studio One. At first I didn’t have the laptop connected to any external monitors, and the fans were super quiet. But once I plugged in my monitors the fans started kicking in, and they were pretty loud.
I guess this happens because of the integrated graphics card. Apparently when using external monitors Apple makes use of this integrated graphics card to handle that task, and this causes CPU to kick into Turbo more often, this increasing the heat, thus increasing the fan noise.
The solution I found was download the Endurance App and pit it into “Low Power Mode”. When low power mode is engaged and the option “Slowing Down Processor” is selected Endurance will stop your CPU from going into Turbo, and this significantly decreases the amount of fan noise.
This solution has worked well for me. I’ve had the laptop for over a month now, and haven’t had any issues with fan noise interfering with recording sessions. I’d say at this point that I wouldn’t consider fan noise to be an issue with the MacBook Pro. You can check out the video above to see this app in action.
