New 2011 MacBook Pro Heating Issue?

I bought the new 2011 line of MacBook Pros yesterday and was wondering if anyone else noticed that the processor heats up a lot faster causing the fans to rev up really high? I had Steam open yesterday re-downloading my games and the fan went ballistic and I don't see why when steam was only using roughly 20% CPU downloading those games. That never caused my previous MacBook Pro's fans to rev up like this.

MacBook Pro 15" Early-2011, Mac OS X (10.6.5), Intel Core i7 Quad 2.2 GHz, 8GB RAM

Posted on Feb 25, 2011 9:41 AM

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849 replies

Mar 11, 2011 5:51 AM in response to killthelights

Interesting to read this, I have no heat concerns but I wonder about my fans, this is my first mac and I was a bit surprised about the fan noise. It's not terribly loud but more so than I expected. I believe there are two fans? The one on the right I can hear all the time, 2000rpm is about cruising speed. The one on the left is inaudible at the same speed unless I put my ear to the area. Could it be that I just have a loud fan or am I just being stupid?

Mar 12, 2011 8:55 AM in response to killthelights

I received my new MacBook Pro yesterday. A 15" 2.2 GHZ i7, hires display. Using an external monitor.

Temperatures:
- 90% idle (according to Activity Monitor): 80 degrees Celcius / 176 Fahrenheit - 2800 RPM
- 0% idle (with yes > /dev/null trick): 90 degrees Celcius / 194 Fahrenheit - 6200 RPM
- After killing the "yes /dev/null" processes temperature drops to 60 degrees celcius / 140 degrees Fahrenheit, fans slow down from 6200 RPM to 2800 RPM
- After slowing down of the fans temperature rises again to 75 - 80 degrees Celcius

If I do a task that only requires a bit more CPU usage (nowhere near 100%) the fans starts spinning like crazy.

Is this normal behavior? It's really annoying to say the least. My MacBook Pro from 2008 almost never spinned it's fans at full speed (only when I used it on my lap).

My MacBook Pro is on a Belkin Laptop stand so airflow should not be a problem.

Mar 12, 2011 9:27 AM in response to Meinaart

This is really funny/odd to me. All of you would appear to rather have a machine that is quiet, but running so hot that it's likely harming/heat soaking/damaging the internal components.

You MUST realize that heat kills electronics, and now that QUAD CORE processors(WITH INTEGRATED GPU's as well!!) are being used, these new machines are OBVIOUSLY going to get hotter just that much faster, which is why its GOOD that the fans ramp up faster User uploaded file BE GLAD!!

Common sense HAS to play into this at some point people. If you dont realize that more SPEED is = to more heat(law of physics HELLO), than I'm not sure you need a computer at all, but a lesson in common sense.

In reality, you should all be happy that the fans spin up so fast, because believe me, as a macbook pro user since 2006, the fans have never spun up so fast to cool macbook pro machines down. I've HAD to run SMC fan control on every iteration of MBP I've owned (4) in order to keep temps under 80 celcius (especially when encoding video).

I absolutely REFUSE to allow my machines to run over 80c. At that point, I choose to either place a small desktop fan blowing on the MBP(to help the heat dissipation) or better yet use my Mac Pro tower(right tool for the right job analogy), which I also run smc fan control on, but due to the thermal airflow (flowthru) design and size of the fans, I can easily keep it below 70c even with all 8 cores maxed for hours.

Now many users (eww comes to mind) will tell you that you're safe up to 100-105c, but I assure you that just because it MAY be safe on "paper" does'nt mean its good for these notebooks to get that hot. Thermal dynamics don't lie....

Just my 2cents and laugh/doubt me if ya want, but out of 7 machines in 5 years(none returned/failed), I feel I've truly learned the in's and outs (flaws) of Apple's hardware thermal design(thin means MORE HEAT IN SMALLER SPACE/HORRIBLE COOLING), and successfully adjusted accordingly.

Good luck!

Mar 12, 2011 10:36 AM in response to osxtasy91

Common sense HAS to play into this at some point people. If you dont realize that more SPEED is = to more heat(law of physics HELLO), than I'm not sure you need a computer at all, but a lesson in common sense.


I haven't been following this thread, but I do believe that the above statement is incorrect. Future CPUs could be both faster and use less power, and older slower CPUs might use more power. Also consider SSDs, which are dramatically faster than spinning hard drives, yet they run much cooler.

Mar 12, 2011 11:13 AM in response to Michael Chabot

Michael Chabot wrote:
Common sense HAS to play into this at some point people. If you dont realize that more SPEED is = to more heat(law of physics HELLO), than I'm not sure you need a computer at all, but a lesson in common sense.


I haven't been following this thread, but I do believe that the above statement is incorrect. Future CPUs could be both faster and use less power, and older slower CPUs might use more power. Also consider SSDs, which are dramatically faster than spinning hard drives, yet they run much cooler.

+1. Ivy Bridge (which will be built on a 22nm process vs. Sandy Bridge's 32nm process) is estimated to offer a 20% performance improvement over Sandy Bridge and will run cooler/use less power due to its smaller fab.

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New 2011 MacBook Pro Heating Issue?

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