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pgolik

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 13, 2011
75
55
Hello everyone!
I have a strange problem with my mid-2015 15" (which is otherwise still going strong, and I plan to keep it for another year or two). The dGPU (Radeon M370X) temperature will briefly spike to crazy values, even though it's not even in use at the time. Like this (observe the 128 C spikes):
gpu temp.jpg

At the same time the GPU Proximity sensor doesn't show anything out of the ordinary:
gpu proximity.jpg

and neither does the CPU:
cpu.jpg

The CPU load never was above 40% at the time, and the dGPU was not even in use (only built-in screen, no apps that use dGPU (here's dGPU load graph):
dgpu load.jpg


So why the brief temperature spikes? Can it be a damaged sensor? I did reset the SMC recently (as I was getting throttling with high kernel_task percentage every so often). The MBP did get new thermal paste some 18 months ago, I plan to repaste it, but it doesn't look like a true temperature problem. Is it the Radeon sensor, or a driver bug (I'm on 12.6.1 - the newest this MBP supports). The fact that it's exactly 128 °C makes it look like a software problem (2^7), but it may be a coincidence.
 
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