Apogee Duet makes CPU warm using Leopard

Hi K,

I use both systems with Duet and never had that issue.

Jorge

For some reason, Duet is drawing too much power OR your cpu thinks that the Duet is drawing too much power off the firewire bus. It shouldn't... Get in touch with Apogee.

Hello,

How are you monitoring your CPU temp? I was using Temperature Monitor, but several folks on the Mac Pro discussion forum told me that it was not reliable and to download iStat Pro. I will download it this afternoon.

I had a session the other day and my Duet was really hot (was worse with phantom power on), but not so much my mac. I was turning of the AC every time we would record, in south Louisiana in the summer this is not a good idea, not sure if I should be concerned about the Duet or not. Is your Duet hot as well?

Anyhow, getting accurate temp readings should help you when dealing with apogee. Good luck!


-delton

Something similar happened to me (fans extremly loud and cpu hot)........... But , it was not he Duet. It was software issues. I took it to the apple store for check up, and all they did is wipe the hard drive and install a fresh copy of leopard. Since then, no more problems.

I just got my Duet last week and am having the same problems. The CPU fan ramps up to full speed, at which point any benefit that the Duet gives in sound quality is completely negated by the fact that i'm struggling to hear it over a very noisy fan.

Does anyone from Apple actually read this? Because i've already contacted Apogee and they said it's a problem with the 13" Macbook/Logic/Leopard combination and that a LOT of people have reported this problem. They said to contact Apple but somehow I get the impression that this will not be resolved because it's just not a big enough problem for them.

My duet is useless because of this, and i'd hate to return it because it does sound great but that's the way things are heading since it seems to be a problem that has been known for some time, yet every update that comes out fails to address it.

All i can say to anyone who is looking is if you own a Macbook, DON'T get a Duet, unless you like the sound of your CPU fan a whole lot.

hi,
i'm still on 10.4.11 and a similar thing happens.
the fan starts up randomly.
sometimes for hours.
doesn't have to be under load.
DR9.

I've found a bit of a band aid solution which does in fact work. I saw a little app called CoolBook mentioned on another forum, and since i'm desperate paid the $10 to try it out. I'd have to say it's definitely only for the brave or those that know what they're doing, but essentially you undervolt your CPU so that it doesn't produce as much heat and you don't get any loss of speed, the tradeoff is that you MAY get kernal panics and it can become unstable if you undervolt too low. I've got my CPU core temperature down to 65-70ºC average (it used to be 80ºC and over) using a fairly modest setting, and now the fan barely comes on at all even when i'm bouncing tracks, it's great. The program overrides the standard voltage/frequency settings set by intel - as i said it's probably only for the very brave (or very desperate in my case).

All i can say is the program works, but if you're not confident you'll probably have to either look elsewhere or wait for the official fix which may or may not be forthcoming. It's pretty terrible that the only solution i've been able to find is to basically hack my computer.

I called Apple. They said they have heard of the problem but have no solution. Then I called Apogee, who said the same thing because they haven't been able to replicate the problem.

As a hunch, I think our firewire drivers are corrupted. Apogee used to have the firewire driver bundled with the download driver from their site. They recently took that download out of the package because Leopard has that driver built in to the operating system.

So the question now is: who can find the most current firewire driver to reinstall it??? I'd rather do that than format my machine.

P.S. I've also repaired permissions via Disk Utility in every combination possible.

I found this thread interesting. I'm having the same issue with my M-Audio Profire 2626. The fan on my MacBook screams under normal usage. I owned a FW-410 before that, and recently picked up a MBox Pro, and did not experience the same problem.

The Profire gets really hot, and the noise coming from the MB almost makes recording useless.

SOLUTION!
According to my iStat widget, my machine went from 160 degrees F, 62000rpm fan to 146 degrees F, 5700rpm after a high load on my processor. I have found that when I plug in my duet now, my processor does not heat up past 142 degress / 1800rpm until after a load on my processor.

I just completed this with much success. Someone else please try this to confirm the results!!!

1. Repair Disk Permissions in Disk Utility (found in Applications -> Utilities)
2. Repair disk in Safe Mode: during boot up, hold [cmd] + [s], then type "sbin/fsck fy" & press [return]. *Do not include the quotation marks for any of the strings I'm listing *

Then type "reset-nvram" & "reset-all".
When finished with step 2, type "shutdown -r now"
(If you're using a non-intel machine / Tiger, boot in Open Firmware mode for the two reset commands mentioned above: [cmd] + [option] + [o] + [f})

3. Reset PRAM: [cmd] + [option] + [p] +[r] during boot up
4. Reset the PMU from a fresh boot: press & hold the power button until the LED light flashes in the front right corner of your machine. You will also here a long beep when this is complete.

5. Reset the firewire bus by shutting down, unplugging EVERYTHING & taking the battery out for over 15 minutes (I left mine out for 30 min).

Please let me know if this works for anyone else.

Um..A couple of things. The disk repair command is "/sbin/fsck -fy" again no quotes. Also Intel Macs use EFI and not open firmware. "reset-nvram" and "reset-all" do not work unless you have a PPC Mac. Reseting the PRAM on an Intel Mac will reset the NVRAM. Just clearing that up.

Stootka

Ah cool yeah you're right- thanks for that.

I know I'm eating my own words here but the problem came back today... It temporarily knocked my CPU idle to 146 degrees F but it still jumps from 121 to 146 as soon as I plug the Duet in. I'm going to reformat tonight. I'll let everyone know the results when I'm done.