Edit CPU TDP in MacOS

[dusk007]

Is there anyway to change the cpu TDP setting in MacOS.
In Windows you can just use Intel XTU to set basically anything.

I don't care about overclocking my Notebook I just want to tell the 45W TDP CPU that is is now a 25W CPU.
A lot of Dev tools often cause the fans to spin up a lot. These are mostly background tasks like indexing. If they take longer I don't care but I do get annoyed by the fans.

I wish there was an always quiet 15W notebook in 15" chassis.
I know I'd need a Dell XPS 15 to make me happy but that is not in the cards right now.

I have a 15" MacBook Pro Haswell CPU generation. Late 2013.
Can I edit some file somewhere to make my cpu less of hothead.

 

[leman]

You can use this open source utility to modify the MSR: https://github.com/sicreative/VoltageShift

Or you can use a GUI wrapper that does this for you, such as https://volta.garymathews.com

 

[dusk007]

Thank you that is what i was looking for. I will test this.

 

[Salty Pirate]

I found that running turbo boost switcher on my mbp made the thing silent. like the fans do not ever come on.

you can enable it so it prevents turbo boost on battery or all the time. Best part, no system modification to enable.

 

[dusk007]

I prefer the power limit to disabling Turbo.
My haswell has a base freq of 2.3 Ghz. Disabling Turbo is quite a big performance reduction.
30W still allows short turbos up to basically max for one and two cores. But even under load it takes a lot longer to actually get loud. For most tasks this does not even affect performance at all.
It just gets forced down to 2.3 Ghz much sooner.
Intel Power Gadget works on Mac and shows how the tdp and clocks change.
The chips goes to something like 55W if you don't limit it, but the max Turbo is only about 3Ghz (3.5 on ST) or so. It won't really breach 30W if it is just a single thread making trouble (unless it is sustained).
Actually disabling Turbo really kills single threaded performance.

Yeah having to disable SIP sucks but giving users some control in this area out of the box would really be nice of apple. Many other notebook makers had different variants of silence modes (some are crap). Especially the newer macs with their 6 core hot heads, with Intel pushing the max they should have added it. Having to hack the system to get such a simple hack in would be nice.
On a Dell you don't need to disable any security measures.
It is such a simple change and makes a big difference. People can then decide when they want max performance and when they just want the damn thing to stay silent. Intellij IDEA is a bit of a noisy app on a Notebook.
I don't think peopel should select their own TDP but a silence button/mode where 3k rpm is fan max and clocks/tdp just drop if thermals require it.

Also they should just add a cheaper 15W 15" Notebook. Those 4 cores clock really high and for anything but sustained multi threaded loads there basically just as fast but all else the same, they'd be much easier to keep silent.

PS: Does anybody know why they say only Haswell and Broadwell are supported? Lucky me but shouldn't newer ones too?

 

[leman]

PS: Does anybody know why they say only Haswell and Broadwell are supported? Lucky me but shouldn't newer ones too?

That is only in regards to undervolting. TDP limits should work for Skylake and above.

 

[dusk007]

Yeah now that I looked at the page again, that what it actually seems to say.
Undervolting is nice but it does less and less nowadays with intel running the chips much closer to their actual limits. I remember back in Pentium M times you could sometimes almost half the power with undervolting going from 1.02V down to 0.7 at idle speeds. Now chips are just better out of the box.