104°C max temp of i7 cores (seen with HW monitor) during AVCHD files XFR!!

Hi all,

during importation of AVCHD files (for a total of 3Gb) on an external HDD (on battery supply) from an SD card inserted in MBP slot, according to HW monitor (bresink s/w), CPU core temperatures hit 104°C !!!! Is it possible? The bottom of MBP was very warm...
Moreover it appeared that it took only waiting to overtake 100°C (given by HW monitor) to the fans to kick in!! and in spite of this, after fans kicking in, the CPU 2 and 4 temps seemed to remain at 102-103° whilst 1 and 4 were going down (what makes me doubt about HW monitor...)...
What is strange too is that I have lifted the MBP of about 5cm above the table (in order to improve ventilation) but it did not change at all the effect on max temperature.

What do you think? did you notice a so significant overheat during importing some files (AVCHD like and form some Gb) to your MBP?
How much can I trust HW monitor?

Tomorrow is the 14th day of life of my MBP: I am going to sleep (here in france) --> night will advise me whether or not to request to be refunded......as I have encountered once too the freezing occurrence...
What do you think?

MBP 15" i7 2.66 / 8GB RAM DDR3 / 512 GB SSD, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on May 19, 2010 2:57 PM

17 replies

Rod Hagen

Level 7

32,000 points

May 23, 2010 12:33 AM in response to califfo1975

Looking at the Intel data sheets for the i5 and i7 mobile processors (at http://download.intel.com/design/processor/datashts/322812.pdf ) I see that Intel rate the maximum core temp at 105ºC and themselves suggest that cooling system should ramp up when the temperature is about 10ºC below this, califfo (ie at about 95ºC, where you say yours does just this).

The processor also has both software controllable throttling and automatic failsafe override capabilities built in.

Doesn't look as if there is really any chance of you frying your CPU, and even the high figures you report seem to co-incide pretty clearly with Intel's own recommendations for efficient operation.

Cheers

Rod

califfo1975 Author

Level 1

8 points

May 23, 2010 7:00 AM in response to Rod Hagen

Thank you Rod. I fully agree with you also in the light of what I was able to find out on internet (other forum) and on an i5 17"mbp.
In spite of this, I still find that the fans activation is sometimes too late and unnecessarily. Anyway this seems to be engineered, I trust apple and at first problem with CPU, apple care (3 years) will protect my mbp.
Ciao

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104°C max temp of i7 cores (seen with HW monitor) during AVCHD files XFR!!