Projections of future interannual to decadal climate variability are influenced both by processes internal to the climate system and by external influences such as anthropogenic activity. Recently, single-model initial condition large ensembles have become increasingly popular for assessing climate variability, due to their unique capacity to separate internal variability from forced trends. Here we present results from the recently completed 20-member ensemble conducted with the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 1 (E3SMv1-LE), which uses a “macro” initialization strategy choosing coupled atmosphere/ocean states based on inter-basin contrasts in ocean heat content (OHC). This model simulates tropical climate variability well, despite the tendency for E3SMv1 to overestimate the cooling trend due to aerosol emissions. We compare the ensemble spread behavior in E3SMv1-LE to other large ensembles, and find that despite its small size the E3SMv1-LE's initial climate spread is comparable to other (larger) SMILEs, suggesting that maximizing inter-basin ocean heat contrasts may be an efficient method of initializing large ensembles. We also examine the sensitivity of tropical Pacific climate and the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to future climate change in E3SMv1 as compared with other ensembles, including the E3SMv2 large ensemble and single-forcing ensembles run with other models.