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by Aurornis 597 days ago
> it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move,

I routinely get my M1 fans spinning from compiling big projects. You don’t have to get the GPU involved, but when you do it definitely goes up a notch.

I read so much about the M1 Pros being completely silent that I thought something was wrong with mine at first. Nope, it just turns out that most people don’t use the CPU long enough for the fans to kick in. There’s a decent thermal capacity buffer in the system before they ramp up.

1 comments

Huh! I regularly max CPU for long stretches (game development), but I found I could only get the fans to move if I engaged the neural cores on top of everything else. Something like a 20+ minute video export that's using all available compute for heavy stabilization or something could do it.

The M3 is much more typical behavior, but I guess it's just dumping more watts into the same thermal mass...