What am I doing wrong.. New Laptop

[Ian McGrew]

Hey guys, I had a 2016 MacBook Pro 15" with a 2.9GHz processor i7, 8GB of Ram and 2 TB Flash storage and now I have a 16" MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 ram, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB and an 8tb SSD. I would have loved to get a mac pro but I am on the road so much I needed a laptop. I am not all that happy with the speed on transcoding and outputting in RedCine-X/ FCPx. Is there a setting I don't know about that I should have turned on? I almost feel that this computer i slower for outputting to ProRes than my older one. Any thoughts?

 

[AndreeMarkefors]

Is it VERY new? Has it completed setup?

After installing MacOS and logging in with your AppleID, sometimes it can take... I don't know... 48h or so of downloading and configuring if you've got lots of stuff online that needs to sync.

Your new 8-core should be significantly faster.

 

[Audy Erel]

Make sure you plugged the MacBook Pro to the mains power and not only using the battery power when transcoding. Probably you already knew it but it's worth noting that any laptop will throttle down severely when using battery only.

 

[David Rasberry]

Laptops should not throttle down on battery unless that is how power management is set up. Performance of mine doesn't change, but battery life in hi performance mode is only 1.5 to 2 hours. About half of maximum economy settings.
Is your new Mac actually using the Radeon, or is it using the chipset GPU? That makes a huge difference. Also making sure that all hardware level drivers, BIOS, and OS are fully up to date.

 

[Ian McGrew]

not sure what the chipset gpu is versus the radeon...

otherwise yes I've had it for a month and this thing is just slow. There has to be a bottleneck somewhere..

 

[AndreeMarkefors]

Yeah, doesn't sound right.

Have you checked task manager to see that you don't have some old process/failed to load properly plugin that's stuck in a loop using up CPU cycles?

Did you do a clean install or was it some sort of restore-from-backup?

 

[Ian McGrew]

Yeah, doesn't sound right.

clean install. and not quite sure what CPU cycles are or you mean...

 

[Audy Erel]

Ok, maybe not all laptops but mostly laptop with deteriorating Li-Ion battery (more than 4+ years of age) will engage into power saving mode to conserve power and it simply can't supply with enough juice anymore for spikes in heavy processing while on battery (Intel SpeedStep in action). If plugging the adapter solves the issue then it's confirmed a battery problem, if not then something else.. maybe a thermal management issue (accumulated dust in the heatsink fan, thermal paste gone bad, etc.). Just my wild guess

 

[Ian McGrew]

this thing is 4 weeks old...

 

[Ian McGrew]

So I am currently transcoding 16 clips. A total of 32 minutes of footage and it says it's going to take 20 hours.