M4 Pro Mac mini CPU very hot during gaming

While recording video with OBS Studio, the temperature quickly reaches 100 degrees Celsius, and the fans are insufficient to reduce this heat. I have to use a fan management program to lower the temperature. I took the product to Apple Store Turkey (Caddebostan branch), and they told me that their tests showed the product was not hot. When I asked them, "How many degrees does it need to be for you to consider it hot?" they said there isn’t a specific number for this. In other words, they don’t even know what they base their hot or cold assessment on. The product operates at a minimum of 65 degrees Celsius during normal desktop use. When I open any application, the temperature quickly rises to 100 degrees. This situation is unacceptable. Do not buy this device. The M2 Mac mini works much cooler and more efficiently than this.

They didn't even said that, they said unsupported game and gaming is not even the problem.

m4 just runs hot and it's Apple's fault.

Quoting from another thread:

I am afraid this new fan behaviour is intended. Apple changed the fan control curves. The M1 Mini was ramped up much quicker, but mostly didn't need to, because it almost never got hot. The denser packed Mini M4 gets hot more quickly, but, my interpretation, Apple doesn't want fan noise to point this out and to annoy the user, because on the Intel Minis, this fan noise felt cheap and screamed insufficient cooling solution.

Everyone will tell you that 100°C is fine and dandy, which may be true for some components, but definitely not for others close by, like capacitors. It is much too early to see if the prolonged heat will have detrimental effects in the long run. Warm expands, cold contracts, so of course this exhibits a force on components that behave differently and at the same time are bonded together. Xbox Red Ring of Death, anyone?

I also have a Mac Mini Pro M4 and I have noticed the same thing. What is strange to me is when I ran cinebench 24 the fans kicked on automatically to cool it down but when I play a game like Path of Exile 2 the fans do NOT kick on and I need to turn them up manually to cool it down. The GPU clusters hit around 104C. I called Mac support and of course they blame it on an unsupported game 👎 Even though the computer SHOULD turn on the fans as needed no matter what “software” is being ran.

Got my M4 Mini last week and was rendering an Adobe Premiere movie and noticed the fans kicked on (for the first time) out of curiosity I installed my TGPro fan app that I also used on my previous computer (really believed I would never need it on this new computer) and the indicator was in the RED and showing 214* F I couldn’t believe it! I quickly went to manual and kicked the fans up even higher. I got it down to 198* F which in the TGPro app is below red and in acceptable temperature range. Looks like I’ll have to manage this fan like I had to on my previous computer. I always figured my old computers thermal paste was probably hardening since it was old but never expected this new M4 to run at THAT temperature?

The problem is you trolling and giving false arguments.

100 degrees Celsius is never good for electronics and especially when they reach from 40 to 100 in not even a second, that's good to say bye bye to your machine in a year or 3. Because of the rapid expanding and krimping of materials.

I too have encountered excessive temperatures and crashes on my new M4 Pro Mac mini. I previously had bought (and later returned) an M4 (not Pro) mini and did not encounter this problem. The M4 Pro is a more powerful, and hence hotter, chip than the M4. I believe the 'problem' in games at least is due to this feature:

Use Game Mode on Mac - Apple Support (CA)

Game Mode pushes your mini past it's normal limits when gaming to get better performance. However the M4 Pro Mac mini's cooling doesn't seem adequate to handle the increased thermal load from Game Mode. Some informal testing in Baldur's Gate 3 with Game Mode disabled showed that the CPU temps were in the mid 80s and GPU temps in the low 90s. (On the Celsius scale that is.) Not great, but not enough to cause crashing. I do need to do more testing, but wanted to share preliminary results.

The downside of course is lower frame rates. But BG3 isn't a shooter, so high frame rates aren't necessary, not for me anyway. The alternative is to use fan control software, which does seem to keep the device cool enough. The fan noise might bother some, but headphones are always an option.

The Apple Support article above has instructions on how to disable Game Mode if any of you wish to try.

I totally agree that this is unacceptable, and it feels like a result of form over function. Apart from the fan management program you already have used, my only other solution would be to consider a Mac Mini M2 Pro instead.

Mine has only got hot(?) when I was doing some very intense video editing and the fan speed did increase to about 2800RPM but aside from that one time the unit remains cool and fan speed is about 1000RPM. I can manually increase the fan using my TGpro app which I did once as the fan did not increase automatically but not sure what the Apple strategy is for fan operation vs temp. so not sure I had to do that.

I'm using TGpro now, but that's the problem, why do I have to use TGpro? And I process 2K video, I use OBS studio. After all, this device overheats. If many people have this problem, it means that such a problem really exists.

[Edited by Moderator]

100 is to hot for everything, Intel AMD Apple.

Indeed, users should not have to look for ways to keep their device cool, Apple should give us decent temps and should not lock us out of the ability to set our own fan curves, that's just anti consumer af.

In cases where I have heavy GPU usage but low CPU usage I've GPU cores sustain 100C+ temps, even saw one hit 106C, while the fans are reporting 58% speed. One fix is to use a fan controller to set a custom temperature threshold, I was able to sustain GPU core temps under 90C with fans reporting 67% speed this way.

It's almost as if Apple's built in fan profile is just based on the average of every sensor combined and not reactive to hot spots. My other sensors were averaging 40-50C while it was just the GPU cores that were out of control. IMO the fans should be ramping up if ANY sensor is going >100C.

The system can easily maintain acceptable temperature levels without jumping to 100% fan speed, it just chooses not to..

So what? What's your problem exactly? Did you buy the M4 to troll Apple or actually use the computer?

My Mini M4 pro runs >200F when I render some HD movies and burn to disc. The fan speeds up from 1000rpm to 2800RPM but cannot hear the fan. The exterior case remains cool to luk warm. No issues in performance.