Heating Up: extreme throttling in Apple’s M2 MacBook Pro

If you push the new MacBook Pro with the M2 chip to its limits, temperatures rise to unprecedented heights. However, the cooling system is not sufficient to cope with this, so there is only one way out of extreme throttling of the CPU and GPU.

Extremely hot and insufficient ventilation

It is common to get chips in heavy-duty notebooks to slow down their performance. In that regard, YouTuber Vadim Yuryev of Max Tech has now picked it up with the new MacBook Pro 13 with an M2 chip. With the export of 8K RAW material, he opts for an extremely labor-intensive task that can push any processor to its limits – depending on the cooling. Yuryev’s first statement: “We exported 8K Canon RAW and measured temperatures up to 108°C, more than we’ve ever seen on a Mac, even on an Intel Mac.” Simply put, the MacBook Pro 13 with the M2 chip heats up more than any MacBook has ever seen. “But it gets worse…” said the tester.

The new M2 model has a single fan to cool the chip, and it was hopelessly overwhelmed in the test described. The fan was at its performance limit at 7200 rpm for its entire run time but was unable to lower the temperature. And so the MacBook Pro had no choice but to “extreme throttling”.

The numbers are devastating

Looking at the resulting numbers, the performance comparison paints a damning picture: As can be seen in the test, the M2 manages its heat problems with strong bursts of throttling that come in waves. The clock speeds of the M2’s performance cores drop from 3200 MHz to 1894 MHz in a split second, and the GPU drops from 1393 MHz to an astonishingly low 289 MHz.

Temperatures quickly drop to 84 degrees and the cycle begins again. The conclusion is quite clear: according to Yuryev, the M2 in the MacBook Pro 13 is clearly slowed down by the flawed cooling system. The solution is obvious here: “We need a better cooling system with two fans instead of just one.”