Macbook Pro 16 Discharging under CPU Intensive tasks

jmsmuy · March 31, 2020

Hi guys!
So, last January I bought a new Macbook Pro (got the 15" 2.3 i9 variant). I needed a Macbook since I need it for work reasons.

The last couple weeks I've been contributing to Folding@Home with it (along with my desktop) and noticed the battery discharges, installed iStatsMenu to see power usages and it seems that with high cpu usage comes high power usage (seems logical) . The stock charger is 94w or 96w, and the computer uses around 120w, so the battery discharges at a rate of about 25w.

Is there a higher wattage power adapter? And if there is, would it "work" with my macbook? (meaning, i'm not sure the usbc protocol for charging on the macbook would be able to take advantage of that)

Anybody else has had this happen to them?

Thanks in advance!

Juan

Theguywhobea · March 31, 2020

Nope. USB-C PD caps out at 100w. These macbooks weren't designed to sustain heavy CPU loads for hours on end. Actually most laptops aren't designed to sustain heavy system load for hours on end. I know with my 2019 RBS it will discharge while playing games on the built in MX150.

schwellmo92 · March 31, 2020

I wouldn't do F@H on your MacBook bro that thing will be pegged at 100c the whole time. If you really want to do F@H disable the turbo boost.

jmsmuy · April 1, 2020

Hi

Thanks for the answers, the problem I'm having is that I'm actually a software dev, and sometimes I do need to process big amounts of data (without going too far out of my way, my thesis for the university involved cuda/openCL/rdf/sparql and took days on end for the algorithm to finish running). I can't believe the engineers at Apple didn't consider this an issue , but I guess that they can't do everything right (because they never do haha).

Just as a patch and it might help somebody else who is having the same issue, there is a github project cpulimit (works for linux/macos) that allows the user to limit cpu to certain processes, i did that so that I can only use 2-3 cores and prevent the system from discharging.

Another thing I did today while processing some data was to unplug the usbc hubs I have, that saved about 20 watts (which counts for a lot when the charger is 100w and the pc was using 120w).

I know that some might think that I should work on a desktop, and you'd be right, I used to work on my desktop (6700k), but lately clients have been asking for react native development as well, and i need macos to be able to program for iOS.