Early 2006 MacBook Pro Over Heat Findings

Hi Shootlist. I did dust it out the last time I had it open. It really wasn't too bad. There was a little dust on the fan blades but overall it was pretty clean inside. I tightened all the screws inside that I could get to, as over the years the temperature cycling, they had relaxed a little. That helped the temperatures a little...like 5 deg F or so.

The paper air filters look pretty clean. There's a screw on the plate holding them but when I removed it, I couldn't get the filter out. The small plate the filters are attached to look like they're pressed into a larger plate. I suppose the filters may be partially filled with micro particles and may be restricting flow a little, but again, they looked completely white, not discolored at all.

Hi OgelThorpe. I've had the thing apart quite a few times....I put in a new hard drive. I've been looking into the cooling pads recently.

The thing actually runs fairly cool most of the time. Once it's stabilized and just idling, the CPU temp is only about 115 F to 120F with the case temp stabilized at 90F or so. Electronics being 20-30 F above board temperatures is fairly normal. When at extended high % CPU activity, the temperature rises fairly quickly. It got up to 230 F after the CPU was at 85-95% for about 3 minutes or so. I would think that the time to get to the hottest temperature would be a little longer than that if there was a good mechanical and thermal path from the CPU to the metal case. Tightening the screws on the main board helped a little-a few degrees. It's almost as if whatever heat sink the CPU has is not what it used to be. The temperature rises about as fast as devices do when they are in free air (i.e. not attached to a heat sink).

Before retiring I designed jet engine electronic controls and am pretty experienced in the thermal behavior of electronics. I need to study the CPU installation a little -not even sure exactly where it is. Perhaps there a heat sink plate that is loose that I can't see with just the keyboard top cover removed.

The more mass you have underneath that is cooler than inside the machine, the better off you are. The problem with the aluminum plates is even though they are pretty flat, they're probably only actually making good contact in 50% of their area, which means they're not real efficient as heat sinks. But the fact that they are getting warm tells you they are doing some good. I experimented with getting the MBP up off the surface in a similar fashion- haha I used a couple of post it notes pads just to allow more air space underneath, but it didn't reduce the temperature at all because there's no air flow underneath the thing.mYour plates are better because they provide more cold mass for heat to flow into. The more cold mass you put under there the better.

Also haha about being intimidated taking that thing apart. My biggest fear was losing one or more of those tiny screws by dropping them on the rug...which I did. My wife and I crawled around on our hands and knees looking for it. Every time I'd pick one up, I'd tell myself.. Don't drop it. And that was just enough thinking about it to make it happen.

I have a widget called iStatPro which is pretty cool. It tells you about 7 different temperatures inside, and gives you the speeds of both fans. And the system pref called Fan Control is great too. You can adjust the speeds such that they run faster at the cooler temperatures than the stock settings. You can also adjust the high end temperature down so that the fans are at max speed at a lower temperature than the stock settings. The penalty for all that is fan noise though. At 6000 rpm, those little fan blades make quite a whoosh. I fiddled around with the settings until Inhad a good balance between being fairly quiet when it was idling, and only going to full speed when it was really getting very hot.

I've been searching the Internet trying to find some info on the circuit board and the CPU location. If it's just soldered onto the logic board, the only way the heat gets out of it is thru the leads of the device and into the copper runs on the circuit board. Then the heat has to travel from there to a cold spot where the board mounts to the chassis. I don't know if it has any kind of heat sink on the COU or not. I didn't see a chip big enough on the top side of the board to be the CPU. I suspect it's on the bottom side of the board facing the cavity where the fan air blows past it....I just didn't have the wear withal to take that board out of there and look at it.

At least I know now though that if I'm going to be doing some really long stretches of high %CPU, it'll make it thru that if it only lasts a few minutes. Like I said, above, when it's idling or only copying small files that last only seconds, it stays pretty cool-cooler than it ran before because I set the minimum fan speed up to 2800 rpm from the stock 1500 rpm. And the temperature stays about 20 deg F cooler than it used to.

Yeah. The towel has saved my butt too. I still managed to get one on the floor last time 'cause like an idiot, I pulled the MBP over to the edge of the table.

I found a couple of good resources while searching- links below. I'm quite sure that the thermal paste on the CPU or the Logic Board - to - heat sink paste has dried out some and no longer making good contact.

Take a look at pages 104 and 106 of the service manual: http://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_15%22_Core_Duo_Model_A1150

Another good assembly and dissasembly resource:

http://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_15%22_Core_Duo_Model_A1150

Taking the logic board out and back in one of these monsters is no small task - many opportunities to screw something up, multiple screw lengths, lots of connections and other little assemblies to take out and put back in.

Sorry. The service manual is here: http://individual.utoronto.ca/kkapoor/macbook-pro.pdf

I found it here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=182117

And slowly but surely wins the race