Quick test of thermals on the new PROLED MacBook Pro
Yesterday, I got the new MacBook Pro with a PROLED display (entering my "PROLED is a good name, actually" era), and one of the things I saw people wonder about with the new design was how the thermals would behave. It's the same M5 Pro and Max chips that the older chassis has, and this new chassis is smaller and lighter, so there is a concern that cooling will be worse on it.
Maybe the fans will kick on more often. Maybe it will just be less performant under load. It's hard to say, but it's a fair question to ask. So as I'm want to do, I ran a little benchmark on the 3 MacBook Pros I have available to me.
- 14" M4 Pro MacBook Pro (outgoing personal laptop)
- 14" M5 Pro MacBook Pro (work laptop)
- 14" M5 Pro MacBook Pro with PROLED
The test
I always like to share my methodology and in this case I used the Quick Subtitles CLI to run a 30 minute benchmark which is designed to heat up the computer and see how it throttles CPU performance. I ran this on a recent episode of Comfort Zone and you can see the exact command I ran below if you wanted to replicate this yourself.
quicksubs bench cz.mp3 --runs 30 --engine apple --csv results.csv
Temps
I'm gonna set performance aside because that's not really what I'm looking at in this test. All I'll say is that the performance was within a few percentage points across all devices, and the PROLED was in the margin of error of the normal M5 Pro.
The gist is that in this one 30 minute test, the PROLED device was slightly warmer at all times than the normal MacBook Pro. It's about 3.5°C difference at the most, and it settled down to about 1° once things got settled.
As with all singular benchmarks, you should take this with a grain of salt. These 3 computers have been in use 2 years, one year, and one day. So while I tried to be as scientific as possible, it's imperfect.
Also, take a look at our M4 Pro king! Basically just as fast at this task and notably cooler doing it. I continue to think the M4 generation of Apple silicon is one of the greats, right up there with the M1.
