#MACS FAN CONTROL M1 PRO#
#MACS FAN CONTROL M1 SOFTWARE#

#MACS FAN CONTROL M1 PRO#

To compare it to a few other Macs I have experience with: I would say the 14” MacBook Pro M1 Max is similar in noise level to the 2018 Mac mini i7. Fan speeds settled around 4400 rpm, so the fans are audible…though difficult to pick out above the sound of the game (which was relatively low at the time). It hit the GPU around 65% and CPU around 300% on default graphics settings at 1920×1080 in a window. I opened Cities: Skylines and left it running on a smaller town. Moving on to gaming, which admittedly I don’t usually have much time for these days. Background rendering also raised the fan speed, but if I was just scrubbing the timeline and doing minor edits, the fan speed kept below 3000 rpm. Again after a few minutes this pushed the fans up to around 5000 rpm. Next I moved onto Final Cut Pro, and exported a 15 minute 4K video. After I stopped compiling, the fan speed dropped back down below the audible 3000 rpm threshold after a couple of minutes. They are definitely audible at that point, though it’s a much less objectionable sound than the higher pitch from the 2019 16” MacBook Pro. The fan speed started increasing slowly after a couple of minutes, eventually reaching between 4000-5000 rpm. So I had to repeatedly build and clean the project for several minutes to get a gauge on how it would do on a bigger project. Returning to the thermals…the thing is, 17 seconds isn’t long enough to raise the fan speed at all on the M1 Max.

Getting 45 minutes of time back every day is a game changer. While working on some larger projects, I can spend more than an hour every day just waiting for Xcode to compile. This is going to save me a ton of time every day, for sure. What is the Mac like when building an Xcode project with 100k lines of mixed ObjC/Swift code? To begin with, the build took just 17 seconds to complete, compared to 61 seconds on a 2019 16” MacBook Pro Core i9. Let’s move on to tasks that present more of a load on the system. Day-to-day tasks that use the GPU, such as Mission Control, feel absolutely fluid on the 6K display, which I couldn’t say about my previous 2019 MacBook Pro. This is in my relatively warm office, around 75☏/24☌. I can’t hear any fan noise until they start spinning above 3000rpm, so at 2500rpm they are inaudible to me. This will trigger the fans to run at around 2500 rpm at idle on the M1 Max. In my office, I typically use a laptop in clamshell mode, hooked up to a Pro Display XDR. I’m posting this for folks who may be on the fence between the 14” and the 16” due to noise and thermals. After using it a second day, I’ve had a chance to push the hardware a little bit more and get a better gauge on the fan noise.

#MACS FAN CONTROL M1 SOFTWARE#

At that point, I only had a couple hours to work on it, and mostly just installed some software updates and apps. Yesterday I posted my initial impressions of fan noise on the new 14” MacBook Pro M1 Max.

And since most of the time I’m using my computer for work, it can affect my work attitude tremendously. For some reason, the noise a computer makes can really affect my experience using it.

Macs fan control m1