MacOS: Reduce fan noise when using Microsoft Teams

The Laptop I’m using for the business is a MacBook Pro, model 2019 (2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7). I’m thankful to be able to choose the Hardware and OS of my business laptop at dbi services. We have collegues using Laptops with Windows, some use Laptops with Linux and a considerable amout of people use MacBooks. However, what annoyed me with my Laptop were MS Teams meetings when the fan noise went up considerably. Many people have reported this several times to Apple and Microsoft but the issue has not been fixed yet. Users of Microsoft Windows have also reported that the load on their systems sometimes go up as well when they are in a MS Teams meeting. As tools like ZOOM or Webex do not have such an issue, it can be concluded that this issue is caused by the MS Teams software. Don’t get me wrong, MS Teams is a good software, but I desparately searched for methods to get my fan noise under better control. The issue may be even worse when working with an external display – most people obviously use external displays in their home offices.

Googling on this, one can find many suggestions on how to fix this issue, but most of them just recommend to make sure no dust is in the Laptop or suggest to not put too much load on the Mac. I.e. things most people check first and hence those suggestions are useless – especially because there is not much CPU-load on my Laptop when using MS Teams.

I tried many other things myself to fix this (like replacing an USB-3 cable to the external display with a DVI-cable as suggested by someone), but most of the recommendations did not help. One suggestion was to manually reduce/customize the fan speed with a tool like “Macs Fan Control”, but that caused the Mac to become so slow that it finally becomes unusable.

Here the 4 things which helped me to get this under better control:

1. Disable GPU hardware acceleration
Go to: Microsoft Teams -> Preferences -> General in the section Application and make a mark at:
Disable GPU hardware acceleration (requires restarting Teams)
As mentioned in that line you have to restart MS Teams after the change to disable GPU hardware acceleration.

2. Disable the Intel Turbo Boost
Install a tool like “Turbo Boost Switcher for Intel Macs” and disable Turbo Boost while using MS Teams.

3. Work with the external display “only” in your home office. I.e. using the MacBook built-in display and an external display together resulted in the fan being more active compared to running with the external display only and keeping the MacBook closed.

4. Some people also reported that the issue went away after using MS Teams Web (in the Browser) instead of the dedicated application.

With above modifications my fan sometimes still starts when using MS Teams, but it is OK and does not become too noisy.