MacBook – 2019 MBP 16″ 2.3Ghz i9 severe thermal throttling (Catalina 10.15.5)

hardwaremacbook properformancetemperature

Brief Summary

2019 MBP 16" 2.3Ghz i9 shows severe thermal throttling

CPU Frequency hovers around 1.9-2.0 Ghz
Power draw doesn't exceed 30W
Max Temperature only 76ish degrees Celcius
Exporting a 5min clip on Adobe Premiere Pro which slams all 8 cores

I've attached screenshots below showing just how much the new MBP 16" i9 throttles. I haven't really had a problem with it until recently… but there are 2 variables:

What's Changed?

Catalina upgrade to 10.15.5 recently
Applecare service replaced the logic board

Questions

Is it likely that the replacement logic board is not up to snuff?
I haven't heard any complaints online (reddit, stack exchange, apple support) of thermal throttling lately. How does one test abnormal throttling?

Screenshots

terminal output after running pmset -g thermlog
intel power gadget showing the aforementioned stats holding steady despite high CPU Utilization.

Best Answer

Thermal throttling is normal behavior for laptops. However, I did not expect the extent to throttling in everyday applications.

While Cinebench R20 shows robustness against thermal throttling, Adobe Premiere Pro thermal throttles right away. The only explanation I can think of is that Cinebench R20 does not engage GPU while Adobe Premiere Pro does. When CPU + GPU are both used in conjunction, thermal throttling happens immediately.

I suppose this is a limitation of laptops.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to monitor and control thermal CPU throttling in OS X

To monitor throttling, you may run:

pmset -g thermlog

in terminal and watch output:

If CPU_Speed_Limit is less than 100 at some moments, then it means CPU is throttled.

IMac – CPU stuck at 0.8Ghz on iMac late 2013 2.7Ghz because of kernel_task

I know this thread is pretty old but firstly I would like to say what an impressive informative post, I am trying not to be too hard on Apple but you are probably far more skilled at fixing iMacs than most apple techs, they are trained to replace parts rather than pin down a fault hence the 'replace the motherboard solution' Apple would come up.

I run a PC Laptop repair shop and fix many Apple products. I too have an A1418 with exactly the same issue works fine but CPU is maxed out with kernel task. I also have tried everything you mentioned, I could of written this post myself.

After much trouble shooting from what I can figure the problem relates to a fan/hd sensor but I cannot seem to locate where this sensor is. I will keep looking and keep you posted if I find any solution.