How hot is the Mac mini 2011 i7 CPU supposed to get?

Just got the same, and ya, it runs hotter than satan's lair. I use Handbrake quite a bit and the CPU stays around 90C.

I've had similar issues with my old 2008-era mini, so much that I believe it cooked the original hard drive.

I tend to use SMC Fan Control to keep that fan's minimum at a higher rpm....helps keep the ambient temp lower anyway. I also point a small desk-fan at the unit to blow the hot exhaust away.

I set the fan speed to min 4000 whenever doing video, keeps it under 150 degrees (so far).

I had a 24" iMac Core 2 Duo just like you, and I have now sold it and bought an i7 2011 Mac Mini - again, just like you. I installed iStat Menus, just like you. I was suprised to see the processor frequently creeping toward 100 degrees under heavy load, just like you. (In fact, I'm starting to wonder if I *am* you!) 😉

It prompted me to go reading up on processor temperatures. I get the impression the Core i7 just happens to be a chip that runs relatively hot, and the temperature you're seeing is normal. The Mac mini cooling system is guaranteed to be well-engineered and you can tell by the way it raises and cuts the fan speed responsively that it does precisely enough to keep the temperature in spec. In other words, everything's fine. Great little machine, isn't it?

I have a 2011 Mac mini i7 2.7GHz CPU, inserted 8GB of memory and replaced the HDD with my own SSD (older Crucial M225). It flies... but when doing some more cpu intensive tasks its fan jumps up fast.

I upgraded from a late 2009 model, so it's my first unibody mini. My previous one I would never hear even under full load. If this fan turns on it's def hearable.. not that much of an issue but still.. I prefered the previous sound level, since I use it as a HTPC etc.

In fact, I'm not at home right now, via remote desktop I had it started downloading something which made the temperatures go up.. now 2 minutes ago my connection dropped and I can't access it anymore, so it looks like it froze, or restarted. I haven't had a freeze whatsoever yet.. I hope it didn't go over certain temperatures, and it was something else..

slightly annoyed here :/

Izzard-UK wrote:

In other words, everything's fine. Great little machine, isn't it?

I wouldn't be so sanguine... While cpus are pretty hardy, disks really don't like to be that hot and will have a shorter life span. I've lost a couple of iMac disks to heat, and that gets pricey because swapping a disk on an iMac is a repair I'm scared to do. While swapping a disk on a mini isn't bad, I'm pretty unhappy with ANY downtime on a server, so I really don't want to do that shut-down-unplug-flip-over-unscrew-lid-pull-disk-swap-caddy-push-disk-screw-lid -flip-plug-power-boot dance particularly often. (Man do I miss the xserve's hot-swappable disk.)

one other thing I've noticed is the apparent lack of air-intake vents on the unibody models. My old -2008ish mini had intake vents all along the bottom border. Could explain why the ambient air is usually 10C hotter on the new model?

As a side note about those nifty air holes on the old minis -- once they get a serious population of dust bunnies, your mini is toast. Burnt toast. So vacuum them out occasionally!

Weeeell, I'll concede that we're effectively early adopters of these new minis, but it's a bit early to start thinking there might be a trend of heat-death coming (I've not heard of any yet). I'm less concerned about my mini kiln having an SSD in there (automatically backed-up, I might add). Hence the sanguinity. :D

I did think to myself it'll make a nice hand warmer in winter if I turn it around and crunch some numbers on it.

Long ago when dinosaurs walked the earth I took a networking class from DEC, where a classmate was 1/6th of the DEC Singapore office. We got to talking about benchmarks -- mips, flops, mega-flops, vups -- this was the early days of RISC and it was a hot topic. My Singapore friend said that they had invented their own performance measure, the SDT which stood for Sock Drying Time. If you got caught in a rainstorm on the way into the office, you'd hang your socks behind the machine to dry them. A VAX 8800 had an SDT of about 3 minutes.

Not surprising from a law-of-thermodynamics point of view, the SDT was rather well correlated with compute performance!

That's cute!

I just had a flashback to my days as a network engineer in the field about ten years ago. There was a company I visited regularly who had (only) six servers in a vault deep in the heart of the building. It had air conditioning cranked up to maximum 24/7, so I spent many miserable days in that fridge changing backup tapes and so on, tying to position myself near the server exhausts to get some sensation back in my face. They were probably 386 or 486 machines and I'd put the SDT at about a week.

I wouldn't worry too much as your intel i7 processor max operating temperature Is around 100 to 105 C.

Also you bought the $799 model Mac mini which was specifically advertised BY APPLE to run games like Portal 2 and Starcraft II. I am sure Apple has taken those games or any other CPU intensive tasks into consideration.

Yeah.. I'm not too worried for failure or anything... the only drawback is noise. The thing starts making serious wind whenever CPU usage is higher as average. My previous ones were very quite.

That's hillarious! VERY, VERY good one 🙂!!!