High CPU temperatures

Here is my experience w/ heat & fans:

While on my lap, it gets very warm when running intensive apps (like Handbrake). However, the fans seem to keep it from getting too hot. I just started Handbrake and put the brightness / keyboard backlight to the highest settings. The CPU temp was in the 60's (Celsius) when I started and then increased up to 80. I watched the fans via iStat Pro. They started around 3000rpm and ramped up to about 5200 when the temp hit 80 degrees. The temp is currently holding steady at 80-83 w/ the fans fluctuating between 4300-5200rpm.

I turned the screen brightness back down to 50% and turned off the backlit keyboard. I noticed the CPU temp drop down to about 73, but the fans stayed up in the 4500 range until the "Heatsink B" temp dropped back to the low 60's. The other temp readings do not fluctuate much at all so it seems the CPU and Heatsink B are the ones affecting my fans the most.

Hopefully 83 degrees is safe for the CPU.

For some reason I feel there is not going to be an update from Apple, so I have installed the MacBook Pro Extended Fan Control ( http://www.derman.com/Download/Special/MBpFanControl.html ). It keeps the temperature under control by speeding up the fans according to user settings. Works very well.

Alright well I got the results back from the test mentioned in my previous post. The engineer said that those temperatures and fan speeds are "expected behavior" for my computer. He mentioned that I have the 2.8GHz processor so it will heat up a bit. Yes it's a faster processor but I really hope 214 F truly is acceptable. I guess we'll just have to trust the engineer, he knows more than I do. I really wish apple would program the fans to keep the computer cool though, not just to kick in on the brink of overheating. I will just continue to use smcFanControl. It's a nice program.

Hey mine gets hot too, one thing i have noticed though, as well as heat, is that - 1st of all i have an imac and macbook pro both 3.06gz) and my imac gets HOT! and so, i expect the macbook pro to get hot too, but...

when using safari on my imac with nothing else open, my cpu uses between 0% - 6% on each core at any given time so the heat comes from the GPU and Northbridge: BUT

on my macbook pro, with safari open but nothing else, the cpu cores use 20-50% at a time and that heats up the cpu temps really fast - it has got upto 90c before in this safari state, i wonder what would happen if i did video encoding on top of that?!?!?!?

I dont understand why the macbook pro uses more cpu power than my imac when doing exactly the same thing, as it has the same core and i used time-machine from my imac to configure my macbook pro - so in effect they are the same computer running the same program?

Proside, thanks for the link to that fan control software, you're a hero.

I think this issue is potentially as bad as the SATA II issue, except that it's only really effecting people who a) have istat installed and care to monitor their temps, and b) those who use their Macbook Pro for heavy duty tasks, eg Handbrake etc. I'd say that a large proportion of the Macbook Pro population probably don't monitor their temps (or are even aware that they probably should).

Of course when a bunch of Macbook Pro's start dying from cracked CPU's (probably just out of warranty), this situation might then get the attention it deserves. til then I'm now happily nicely temperature controlled!

You should submit a report to HULU, but they definitely did something wrong, temps that high are enough to burn your legs through the case, i also would not use it, because temps that high can fry a MBP even a newer one

I have been to see genius twice. They said that's pretty normal!!!!! I disagree because even I use SKYPE, my laptop is getting hot. REALLY HOTTTTTT. And then, everything is slow, stuck.

' Just thought I'd share my own experiences with y'all...

' As you can see from my sig. below, I'm running on a Unibody 17-inch with 2.93GHz CPU... And in the 2 and a half months I've had it I've had only two instances where I was a little worried about my temps - both times during which I was booted into windows and was doing some very heavy gaming for several-hour-stretches in a very warm ambient environment! In both cases the temps clocked 96-97 degrees celcius.

' I frequently get temps in around the mid-eighties levels when not gaming, and up to early nineties when gaming a lot - but the fans always ramp up and keep the temps down well enough - always - and I am a very heavy power user who pretty much abuses his system at all hours of the day - gaming or no!
' Average temps of mid-seventies even when not pushing things seems pretty normal.

' Honestly, the sort of temperatures I've been speaking of aren't anything to be alarmed about. It's only when you start hitting mid-to-late nineties that one should begin to pay attention (I have an audible alarm set to 97 celcius to warn me to throttle back should I ever hit this sort of temperature whilst my eyes aren't on the gauges and should things continue to rise from there or hang about that region too long).
' The chips themselves have thermal-shutdown switches hard-coded into them of 105 celcius I believe. Or 115 - not entirely sure which (though I believe it's 105), which is why my own personal alarm-level is set where it is - low enough to not really be damaging and to give me enough of a buffer-region to work with should manual-intervention be required.

' Only once have I had to acutally do something about it myself - and like I said before, this was during intensive gaming on an incredibly hot day with seriously high humidity.

' From my perspective the sort of activity I've been seeing on my own system has never been something to worry about. But then that's me and my system - I may just be lucky in that mine hasn't developed behaviour I need to be concerned with. That and I'm informed enough about the technology to know what may or may not be healthy and / or desirable.
' Let me just quantify that last statement: It is always desirable to keep the temperature down. Electronics hate heat. Heat will shorten the lifetime of electronics. But the reality we live in leaves is far from ideal - so I'm happy to live with what is only acceptable instead of perhaps desirable. :-D

' Later!

~Menageryl

Hey!
So, I've gotten my new Macbook Pro 13" (mid 2009) with all the lowest configurations except for an upgraded HD about a week ago.
I've been monitoring the temperatures from the first day on, when I noticed that it got up to about 90C while importing music and pictures.
What worries me the most is that during the first few days it had an idle temperature of about 45C to 50C, but after a week the idle temperature is around 55C to 60C.
Another thing that bothers me is the noise. The Macbook is still a lot more quiet than any notebook I've ever had before, but (I might imagine that) I don't think it made any noise on the first day, and now I can hear something when I put my ear really close to the keyboard.

The question is: Should I return it while I'm still in the 14-day returning period, or is all of this normal, and I should just live with it?


Other than that: I turned to the dark side 7 days ago! Bye Windows, hello MacOS X! 🙂

Hey Mac User did you ever hear anything back?