Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

matram

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2011
781
416
Sweden
I have heard that the peek power draw of the 8-core with all cores active is 80 W. AMD specifies 60 W for the 5500M, Apple has obviously tweaked the GPU to draw less than this. But it should be possible for the peak power to exceed 100W very briefly

Then the system is thermally limited to stay below 100 degrees celsius. I am not sure about the thermal limit, but I have heard about 60 W sustained.

That would translate to a little more than one and half hour with the 100 Wh battery. So if you are running full speed, thermally limited, do not expect 11 hours. :)
 

DaakuMaujii

macrumors member
Oct 25, 2015
86
63
Battery life is pretty impressive for regular use. After setting up the system and letting the battery charge to full capacity, I always let it drain while running idle with Mail open in the background and with WiFi connected at 33% screen brightness just to see what would be the absolute maximum I could get out of the new system. Well, it took 24 hours and 15 minutes to fully drain the battery..

On almost full CPU load (many many simple infinite loops in bash doing simple computations resulting in a load of >95%), the system draws a pretty stable ~7425mA from the battery (~85 to 90W), giving an estimate of just over 1 hour remaining, about what you could expect from a 100Wh battery. I stil have to install monitoring tools, so not sure about the turbo frequency here.

So, realistically, battery life is anywhere between an hour up to 24 hours, depending on your use case.

Is there any test or tool that is heavy on both CPU and GPU to test? Maybe the Blender rendering test?
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,202
19,063
This sounds really bad. One hour to get from 100% to 0%?

That’s normal under high load. The battery is 100watt hours after all and the laptop draws between 90 and 100 watts on full load.
[automerge]1575643401[/automerge]
AMD specifies 60 W for the 5500M, Apple has obviously tweaked the GPU to draw less than this.

You are looking at the wrong GPU :) the RX5500M is not the same as Pro 5500M - the later is 50W (official AMD spec).

Then the system is thermally limited to stay below 100 degrees celsius. I am not sure about the thermal limit, but I have heard about 60 W sustained.

60-70W is the sustained thermal performance of the previous 15” model. The 16” can sustain 60W on CPU alone pretty much indefinitely. Combined CPU and GPU sustained power is close to 90W. Peak CPU power draw I’ve seen is close to 95W
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: NeroAugustus

zshane1125

macrumors regular
Jul 16, 2018
130
148
I get 3-5 hours, web browsing with 10 tabs or so, 2 windows, and some music, and occassionally video.
 

Ma2k5

macrumors 68030
Dec 21, 2012
2,561
2,529
London
I get 3-5 hours, web browsing with 10 tabs or so, 2 windows, and some music, and occassionally video.
That is not normal. Something is taking up more energy than it should, check for buggy apps. I noticed at one point my mail app was being a huge hog and had to do some steps to resolve that.
 

danwells

macrumors 6502a
Apr 4, 2015
778
610
Could something be kicking the Radeon on? I discovered that the client app for my QNAP NAS mysteriously does that... External displays also force the Radeon on. The Radeon takes up an extra ~15w of power. on its own... My 16" runs at about 5-8 watts when mostly idle (Mail, Safari, Word), but never goes below 25-30 if the Radeon's running, even if I'm just typing a paper on the external monitor. I suspect animated ads on some web pages may trigger the Radeon - I block ads pretty comprehensively, mostly because they hurt my eyes and for security reasons.
 

zshane1125

macrumors regular
Jul 16, 2018
130
148
I use safari for personal, few tabs, youtube, and chrome for business, 10 tabs, fb, fb ads, google sheets, email, store dashboard etc...
 

Daverru

macrumors newbie
Dec 5, 2019
15
14
Could something be kicking the Radeon on?
Chrome uses the Radeon if web pages use Flash or WebGL. Safari, as far as i know, doesn't.
Some other software can use the Radeon as well.
I'm trying to use gSwitch utility, which forces MacBook use the internal GPU. But unfortunately it can't do it while an external monitor is connected.
 

zshane1125

macrumors regular
Jul 16, 2018
130
148
What is this spotlight indexing thing? I used migration assistant from my old mac to the new one, and I had spotlight completely disabled. Does this mean my battery will never be optimized?
 

macrunach

macrumors newbie
Dec 4, 2019
7
1
Hello Everyone,

I hope to understand the effect of RAM (16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB) on the battery life of the MacBook Pro 16. I am planning to get a maxed out version with 64 GB ram, 8GB 5500m graphics, 2.4 GHz 8core i9 for mainly simulation work (MATLAB and Comsol). Will keep it plugged in while doing the above.

But when I am not running intensive simulations, I hope to use latex for typesetting and also moderate web browsing, how much battery life would I sacrifice with the 64 GB (while unplugged)?
 

joelhinch

macrumors 6502
Oct 2, 2012
378
763
Hello Everyone,

I hope to understand the effect of RAM (16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB) on the battery life of the MacBook Pro 16. I am planning to get a maxed out version with 64 GB ram, 8GB 5500m graphics, 2.4 GHz 8core i9 for mainly simulation work (MATLAB and Comsol). Will keep it plugged in while doing the above.

But when I am not running intensive simulations, I hope to use latex for typesetting and also moderate web browsing, how much battery life would I sacrifice with the 64 GB (while unplugged)?
I have the 64GB
Mine estimates 6hrs light safari browsing at 50% brightness.
 

vkmd

macrumors newbie
Nov 29, 2019
22
4
I am having issues as well. I am doing fairly straightforward Python coding, few tabs in Safari, and Mail and Outlook app in background, and the Activity Monitor shows me anywhere between 4.5 - 6 hours battery life from 100%, which is fairly disappointing. I was expecting at least 9 hours with that sort of work load. I have got i9 2.3/32GB/5500M 8 GB/1 TB. Also, I have noticed that Coconut shows different levels of battery charge compared to the battery icon in the toolbar.
 

macrunach

macrumors newbie
Dec 4, 2019
7
1
I am having issues as well. I am doing fairly straightforward Python coding, few tabs in Safari, and Mail and Outlook app in background, and the Activity Monitor shows me anywhere between 4.5 - 6 hours battery life from 100%, which is fairly disappointing. I was expecting at least 9 hours with that sort of work load. I have got i9 2.3/32GB/5500M 8 GB/1 TB. Also, I have noticed that Coconut shows different levels of battery charge compared to the battery icon in the toolbar.

I guess doubling the RAM has only minimal effect on the battery life. Is the drain due to some background processes.
 

vkmd

macrumors newbie
Nov 29, 2019
22
4
I guess doubling the RAM has only minimal effect on the battery life. Is the drain due to some background processes.

Well I found BetterTouchTool to be a bit of a hog. But even without it, I have not seen any substantial changes in battery capacity. I am giving it couple of more days to sort out the usual background indexing blues and then go from there.
 

macrunach

macrumors newbie
Dec 4, 2019
7
1
@vkmd and @joelhinch , thanks for the info guys. I look forward to seeing the battery performance post indexing. If the battery life is bad, for a $4000 machine, I could go for a 13 inch MBP plus a desktop setup.

I'll hold out on the purchase until more data is available.
 

vkmd

macrumors newbie
Nov 29, 2019
22
4
I am noticing slightly odd behaviour. Activity monitor shows ~10 hours of battery when fully charged but by the time it gets to 85%, battery life is down to 5 1/2 hours. I am only using Safari with 3 tabs, Mail, Outlook, and Atom. I can also notice the bottom panel getting quite hot (I am an old timer Mac user, so not entirely surprised by the behaviour but cooling was supposed to be better on 16'!) I am planning to put the laptop through its paces tomorrow (work day) and see if that is just Activity Monitor being conservative or something else is going on.
 
Last edited:
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.