[Fix] Macbook Pro 16" VRM Throttling

Did you remove the black tape on the bottom case?

Guys I did the mod to my 5600m and it's working great, it lets me sustain a total ~60W versus the previous 50W maximum.

I been thinking about two things that seem to suggest that there's still room for a decent improvement. This only applies if you haven't removed the black tape on the bottom case during the mod, which is probably most people as this preserves your warranty.

1. The black tape is likely a thermal insulator. Thus, without removing it to allow the pads to touch the case metal, the mod is working quite inefficiently.
2. My bottom case, post-mod, where the pads touch the VRM parts, never gets hot enough to cause me much discomfort or pain.

Now according to this water scald temperature chart[1], 46.7C is the pain threshold, and 50C results in a permanent burn injury in 5 minutes. 60C is a minor burn in 2 seconds, you get the idea. So considering that VRMs operate at 80-100C, unless I have a superhuman pain threshold (I don't), the mod I performed (which I see real results from) must not actually be transferring much heat to the case.

I'm waiting on a second bottom case so I can try it out. Hoping that a sustained 70, 80 or even 100W is possible!

[1] waterheatertimer.org/images/Time-Temperature-Scald-2019-600.jpg

I bought the standard Arctic thermal pad listed on Amazon 50 x 50 x 1.5 for 10$
I used the mod and even stacked multiple layers in some areas, and I have some spare pad left over. You should be more than fine with just the standard pad.
Hope this helped! 

I have also just applied the thermal pad mod on my macbook pro 16" (i9 2.3 / 5500 8gb ). I used to get awful throttling in COD warzone droping from 60 fps stable to burst of 15fps! which is totally unplayble. That was with a laptop cooler with two large fans full metal ( i thought it would've dissipated the heat)

I will report back if the mod has positive results. For the moment Unigine superposition tests look stable even after 4 tests back to back with 1200 clock speed.

Ok I will try to write my experience as best as I can because this mod was the ONLY way I could actually get somehow the performance close to the numbers that appear on paper when you buy this laptop.
I do some gaming on COD war zone and a lot of content creation on all the Adobe suite (MacOS) as well as 3dStudio max/Vray ( Windows) so I bought this laptop as an ultra portable powerful machine till I can build a PC.


I did try every tricks in the book up to now , tested ALL the drivers from this amazing community here , with all the installing combinations , either straight clean install , driver replacement , Morepower tools , quickCPU , Speedfan , MSI afterburner monitoring , energy settings etc etc.
I would ALWAYS throttle even with a full aluminum laptop cooler with two 140mm fans on full + full blast speedfan.

For example in Warzone I would drop from 60FPS to 15FPS after few minutes , with temperatures below 80C and sometimes below 75C ! So it was so clear that something else was creating the problem. On the MSI tool you can clearly see the card going from 30W down to 15-20W that would instantly drop any kind of performance. Core clock was dropping from 1000mhz to 300mhz !! and the memory clock would drop from 990 to 135!! that would almost freeze any game. 

When I asked at an official Apple service explaining the situation they were completely against it, saying I would loose the warranty (apparently they will know if you have opened the back) and possibly increase thermals which is completely stupid, I guess they didn't even think about it they just said NO as a reflex. Why the hell didn't they resolve this issue from the get go its a mystery to me. Thermal pads can ONLY DO GOOD to your otherwise cooking hot system. 


So after much thought , contemplating better be safe than sorry I did the mod. I have attached photos, I used 1.5mm Grizzly thermal pads 8w/ mK.  
First I place two stacks of the pad on the lower area to bring it up to the height of the silver coloured modules then applied a single strip to connect them all together. 

I have tried it for two day now with the laptop cooler and its a completely different machine!! 


I can sustain clock speeds from 900-1200 with FPS going from 60-100 on COD war zone on 1080p external monitor (laptop screen off) low/normal settings for snappier gameplay. 
The card draws 40-45w constantly I saw some drops in watt down to 30-35 that's when the FPS go to 60.  But considering the awful performance before the mod this WAY better. 
Temperatures go from 70-80 never exceeding that envelope. 
( MorePowerTools - 1250mhz limit High / 900 limit low , quick CPU 2.2/2.8ghz speed shift , speed fan - custom 50-70C speed curve ) 



For 3D rendering I can sustain a stable clock speed of 3.2ghz on 80-85C on the CPU with 100% Load on all the cores constantly. 

I am not sure if they would ever know that I opened the laptop if I ever need to get service under warranty but atleast I feel safe to push my laptop now to a higher limit for gaming or work. 

Yes I did limit the CPU on QuickCPU with the speed-shift option. I had a setting of 2.2 minimum clock , 2.8 max allowed clock and 2.4ghz desired performance. That was for gaming as I don't think I need much more than that.
I am not sure how to limit or control the CPU watt directly or how to monitor the total wattage the laptop draws when its under load. 

I will happily post it if I know where to look for it. 

The easiest way is to install MSI Afterburner and enable the on-screen display. This allows you to get both CPU and GPU watts and temperature right on your game screen while you're playing (something like attachment [1]).

Here's a random vid I found showing how to set it up:

The other way is file logging with XTU, GPU-Z which is more accurate but requires data massaging and Excel.