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Posted by Gastredner

- Today at 12:43:34

Quote from: heffeque on March 16, 2026, 12:40:51
Quote from: its all about on March 16, 2026, 10:44:02means the M5 Max SoC is held back by the limited power envelope of the chassis
You could reword that as: M5 Max consumes too much power for the desired power envelope.

You could, but it would simply be wrong. More power equals more performance. Due to the fact, that both the Macbook Pro 14 and the Pro 16 have atrocious cooling for the sake of being ultra slim and light, both need to throttle down the M5 Max dramatically.

On reddit, i saw a post a while ago, which showed that the M4 Max can draw up to 160W in multicore peak loads. Notebookcheck's measured 78W is not even 50% of that. And on sustained loads, the power drops further to 65W, if I understand it correctly. This would be rougly 40% of the full power on the 16-inch version. The 14-incher would be nearer to just 30%!

High-end windows notebooks have dramatically better cooling with much more heatpipes and bigger fans. They could run the M5 Max with higher power and performance and stay much quieter at the same time as their cooling is designed for 230W or more.

Posted by sdadsadsadas

- March 16, 2026, 15:06:08

it makes sense because apple obtained much of the extra performance with the M5 by increasing frequencies and TDP

Posted by heffeque

- March 16, 2026, 12:40:51

Quote from: its all about on March 16, 2026, 10:44:02means the M5 Max SoC is held back by the limited power envelope of the chassis

You could reword that as: M5 Max consumes too much power for the desired power envelope.

Posted by its all about

- March 16, 2026, 10:44:02

means the M5 Max SoC is held back by the limited power envelope of the chassis

Posted by Redaktion

- March 16, 2026, 01:12:29

Apple's new M5 Max SoC shows its full potential in the larger MacBook Pro 16 and the performance is noticeably better compared to the MacBook Pro 14. The performance is also stable, and the fans are quieter at the same time.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-s-M5-Max-in-the-MacBook-Pro-16-is-around-15-faster-compared-to-the-MacBook-Pro-14.1250872.0.html