There is a fix coming for the 5500m heat/wattage issues in the next OS thankfully. The MacOS drivers for RDNA are apparently just crap. This problem wasn’t present on the Vega GPUs, and it isn’t present while booted into Windows. To think this lasted all the way through Catalina and Big Sur is insane.

That's great news. Crazy how long it has taken them to fix it though.

> To think this lasted all the way through Catalina and Big Sur is insane.

I can't help but think they didn't want to bother because "new hardware is just around the corner" for longer than they expected.

Where did you read this? I'd love to know more.

Do you know if this fix also applies to the 5300m?

I would also like to know that. AFAIK the 5500 has the same driver issue as the 5300, but even without a fix its baseline consumption with an external screen plugged in is about half of the 5530's.

Hopefully the fix applies to both models but I'm not holding my breath.

I concur, I have a similar setup. Most expensive computer I've ever owned. It just throttles at the drop of a hat. I worked through it all with the apple techs, jumped through hoops for many hours and provided detailed diagnostics. They dismissed me with "throttling is normal, there's no problem".

In the real world, my 2017 MBP performed better just because it didn't throttle. Ridiculous.

As for the supposed 'Low power mode' in Monterey - I'm not convinced that isn't just turning on throttling manually.

There are two kinds of throttling going on. CPU and VRM.

CPU is normal - prevents CPU temps going above 100C.

The issue is VRMs which have no cooling. And no public sensors.

The fix is to add thermal pads to your VRM chips to dissipate the heat to back plate. Entirely solves all throttling issues. Cleaning fans should help too.

My 2019 Macbook air becomes unusable when I plug in any external display... or let the battery fall below 20%... or have 2 electron apps open... or if I look at it funny

In my case it only takes one electron app on my Air (with external display). Teams.

To be perfectly fair with you though; I have a Dell Precision with a Xeon CPU (E3-1505m v6) and an nVidia GPU (k1200m) and it can’t output _one_ 5K display.

I think it’s possible your expectations are a bit optimistic here.

Maybe but it worked fine on my previous one (2016 I think but could be wrong). I would do the thermal pad mod if I wasn’t planning on trading it in as soon as the new ones come out.

I yet have to find a non apple laptop that can run one 5k monitor...

The VRM thermal pad mod will fix all your issues.