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My Macbook Air is very hot even just running a 2D game???

Device: Macbook Air 2017 Intel Core i5 1.8GHz (turbo boost 2.9GHz)


My Macbook Air CPU got to a temperature of over 100 degrees celsius. All I was doing was playing BTD5, running chrome in the background (but not doing anything in it), and that's about it.


I checked the Activity monitor, the game was running at 95%+ capacity of my CPU. I noticed that the temperatures were increasing and increasing the more I was playing. This is not supposed to happen, I have played far more intensive games and did far more things at the same time with many apps running in the background and it never reached this temperature.


My Mac was never this hot when running this game, it was always around 65-75 degrees when running this game, it would only increase when there are more towers or balloons in the screen, but as shown in the screenshot, there is barely anything going on in the game.


Is there a problem with my Mac? Perhaps maybe a problem with the application or software? This is only a very graphically low 2D game, and it seems to heat up to max temperature even with little things going on in the game, I have run far more intensive games than this to reach that amount of temperature. The CPU even throttled down even when there is little to nothing happening in the game.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Sep 4, 2022 10:59 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 5, 2022 12:24 AM

Activity Monitor will easily reveal energy-intensive apps or processes. Even though the game itself may not be using more CPU than it has been, its temperature is affected by the total usage of all apps and processes. It is likely you will find other apps and processes contributing to heat production, perhaps more so than in the past.


Give your Mac every opportunity to keep itself cool. Read Keep your Mac notebook within acceptable operating temperatures - Apple Support.


... running chrome in the background (but not doing anything in it),


Google does lots of things in the background including updating itself without your intervention. Those updates always result in greater resource usage, which makes correlation difficult because it's difficult to know when those updates were installed.


Quitting Chrome has no effect because Google is constantly harvesting your personal information whether you are using it or not.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 5, 2022 12:24 AM in response to Cyflor-N-Ac

Activity Monitor will easily reveal energy-intensive apps or processes. Even though the game itself may not be using more CPU than it has been, its temperature is affected by the total usage of all apps and processes. It is likely you will find other apps and processes contributing to heat production, perhaps more so than in the past.


Give your Mac every opportunity to keep itself cool. Read Keep your Mac notebook within acceptable operating temperatures - Apple Support.


... running chrome in the background (but not doing anything in it),


Google does lots of things in the background including updating itself without your intervention. Those updates always result in greater resource usage, which makes correlation difficult because it's difficult to know when those updates were installed.


Quitting Chrome has no effect because Google is constantly harvesting your personal information whether you are using it or not.

My Macbook Air is very hot even just running a 2D game???

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