Mac Always Running

I have a brand new Mac Book Pro 16" with 64gb RAM.
It is always hot with the fan running 24x7.

I can’t figure it out since Clean My Mac never shows anything using a lot of CPU or anything.

Any ideas on:

  • How to figure out what is causing it
  • How to stop it

Thanks,
Matt

If it’s really brand new it might be spotlight indexing and other stuff, it should stop in a few days.

At this point it 2 weeks old.

What does Activity Monitor (sorted by cpu %) show?

Only shows 13 - 16% CPU Usage

Have you tried restarting it?

Yes still issue post restart.

Have you tried this?

Is it connected to one (or two) 4K external displays by any chance?

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Connected to a Samsung 43" external monitor not sure if it’s 4k.

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I’d go with the external monitor issue too.

You have a lot of crp in Dropbox – depending on the settings, it might be doing a lot of sync / indexing.

Is that value for Trash really the case? You might want to clear that up.

Trash is actually empty but not registering in clean my mac as empty right now.

I wonder if it is the monitor.

Well the monitor is the easiest to check :wink:

If CleanMyMac is giving false values try turning it off for now, see if that helps.

Also, see what the temp is like when you’re not running Zoom.

Here is what it looks like post restart and SMC reset.

I noticed Zoom in your screenshot. Running that application (or Teams) drives my 2017 15" MBP to high temperatures too. I guess it’s “just” bad programming on Zoom’s side.

I’m also running the 16”. I do notice it to be fairly aggressive with kicking on the fans even with modest CPU usage.

Based on your screenshots it looks like your temperature is all right so perhaps look into software that will let you manually control the fan speed if it bothers you.

I use it hooked up to external monitors so I don’t feel the heat on my hands so much but when I do put my hand on the keyboard I can feel it is typically somewhat warm. However that doesn’t mean that the system is operating at it unsafe temperature or a temperature that would cause performance throttling.

Ambient room temperature also matters. On hotter days I noticed the fan is sometimes on more.