I recently had and returned a 14" binned 36GB M3 Max. Some of my workloads were causing the fans to spin up loud and quick. I mainly do game development work in Unity and Unreal Engine, and I was impressed by how quiet it was in my 2D Unity workflow - the fans never spun up at all. This is WITH Parallels running in the background too. These chips scale magnificently in power draw! Even battery life was impressive compared to the base M1 Pro I was coming from.
Unreal Engine was a different story. It's definitely more demanding of the GPU than the scenes I was working with in Unity, so within 30s-1m the fans were at 5K and pretty blaringly loud. Not to mention the device itself became uncomfortably hot in that time too. All that is to be expected of a machine with this much grunt. The thing that got me was the fan curve/behavior when its continually maxed out. It follows a pattern that looks something like this:
- Allow GPU temps to rise to 102
- Fans turn on/up to ~5000 RPM
- GPU throttles, allowing temps to fall
- Falling temps results in slower fans
- Low enough temps results in unthrottled GPU, causing heat to rise again
- Repeat
This dance became obnoxious after a while, so I tried to set up a custom fan curve with TG Pro. I fiddled with it a bit, but after some time reflected on what I was even doing. The whole reason I decided to stick with a MacBook was for the insane efficiency of Apple Silicon; the cool and whisper quiet performance while doing things that'd make x86 CPUs vomit heat. Tweaking fan curves and constantly thinking about and babying hardware is something I felt I'd left behind with Intel/AMD, so why was I spending all this money on a Mac when I could have a similar experience on Windows? I know I'm being a bit hyperbolic as there are many aspects of mobile computing Apple actually figured out that Microsoft can't like sleep/standy and performance on battery, but the sentiment was strong enough to make me reconsider strongly.
I picked up an unbinned M3 Pro to compare the two side-by-side and found that, even at equivalent RPM, the M3 Pro was significantly quieter. I think they must be using different/beefier fans in the M3 Max variants. Either that or there are multiple fan vendors with drastic differences in noise levels, but while Apple does often source from different vendors for parts, I haven't heard of a recent case where they've had such a wide variance like this. That said, both machines were in a similar class of heat production, differing only in how quickly they reached the point of discomfort. Battery drained much faster on the Max than the Pro under this workload as well. However, I didn't detect any performance loss from throttling on the M3 Pro, which was nice for consistent performance, but outside of it being noticeable the Max's throttling wasn't really a big issue - it still outperformed the Pro by a mile.
My advice is that if fan noise is a priority for you, and you use extensive CPU or GPU-heavy workloads, your best bets are either the Max 16" or Pro 14". I probably could've found a fan curve I'd be somewhat happy with on the 14" Max if I put in the time, but I'd still feel like I'd be compromising. Apple Silicon spoiled me and turned me into a fan noise diva. I didn't realize this until I pit the two machines side by side.
So, I'm sticking with the 14" unbinned Pro with 36GB of RAM. Yes, I'm losing 50% GPU performance which seems crazy when I use GPU-heavy tools, but the experience is so much better imo. Plus, I can easily lower my viewport settings to get desirable performance. Lastly, this isn't my primary work device - I have a Windows desktop for that, so I feel like I have some wiggle room in that regard. If this were my main device, it'd be a different outcome. I'd probably still opt for the 16" though.
Oh, and I did fiddle with Low Power Mode, and found that it's a nifty way to turn your binned M3 Max into an unbinned M3 Pro. However, it does reduce single core performance significantly and, more frustratingly, it limits you to 60hz with no known workaround/hack to force it back to 120hz. If Apple gave us the option to keep 120hz on low power mode, I'd probably have kept it. It's a frustrating issue to search for because the results are filled with Apple apologists asking why you'd ever want to use it that way, or just claiming that 120hz would ruin the mode without acknowledging that most of the power savings come from the disabled cores... but I digress.
