I don't have a MBP 16, but a late 2015 MBP and an iMac of the same age. My MBP can be completely silent or annoyingly noisy, depending on a lot of factors. Gene

I don't have a MBP 16, but a late 2015 MBP and an iMac of the same age. My MBP can be completely silent or annoyingly noisy, depending on a lot of factors. Generally, it seems to get noisy even when being relatively idle, if the room temperature goes beyond approx. 23C. Below that it stays silent unless loaded, above that, even small loads create constant fain noise. Interestingly, my iMac has roughly the same behavior, hinting to a common design parameter of the cooling systems. With load, of course the activity monitor is the friend. Far too often, web pages manage to put load on the machine, even if they appear to be idle. In firefox, use the task manager to find the biggest offenders. Sometimes just reloading them reduces the load. One big influence factor unfortunately not shown in the activity monitor is the GPU load. Just plugging an external 4k screen into my MBP causes the fans to spin up. This is also a good reason for web pages to create fan noise