Early 2015 macbook pro gets extremely hot (100c+)

Its perfectly normal for a macbook pro to reach the temperatures of 100 degrees celsius when doing hardcore gaming. The CPU and GPU both have to work a lot harder to render those million pixels to achieve the beautiful retina resolution during gaming.

You should always play games on lower resolution settings that will help both the CPU and GPU to run a lot cooler.

Your Macbook retina is completely normal. Don’t worry.

Hope this helps.....

Hi

It may depend upon the applications and processes that you are using. Games, videos consume the CPU resources and get the macbook pro hot whereas Text simple Internet browsing and simple applications will not. Check Activity Monitor to determine which applications are the culprits. Click Activity Monitor, this will list all the software processes running, look at the %CPU which has the biggest number running. Try to quit or stop that process. After few seconds check if your Mac is hot. If it is no longer hot - the preocess or application you stopped was the cause of this

Try a SMC reset:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

100°c is probably hotter than what it should be. It is not unusual for games and some other applications to generate temperatures well into the 90°c range. You may have to take some steps in cooling the MBP such as a cooling pad.

If the SMC reset does not help, do have the MBP checked out.

Ciao.

Frederik, you may also be running some Graphic intensive apps simultaneously with gaming. I recommend you to close all other applications including the web browser because games are the one which needs maximum CPU and GPU usage.

Also, check if your file vault is off because even that could generate a lot of heat running in background alone with gaming.

Also, check if the spotlight indexing is active or not. Thats also a resource hog if running in background along with gaming.

You should always operate your macbook pro on a hard surface and not on your lap directly or on soft bed or couch.

If that doesn't help then reset the SMC as Ogelthorpe suggests.

Hope this helps.....

Did the SMC reset lower your temperatures? I'm having the same problem. I play diablo 3 and it gets up to 103 celsius instantly according to Temperature Gauge and iStat Menus 5. I've tried SMC reset but it hasn't helped. Maybe i'll try a few times. I also have a windows 8.1 bootcamp partition.

This happens to mine too! The genius bar guy acted as if i were crazy when I said 100c - he's like "you do know that is hot enough to boil water, right?" (yes lol, i'm familiar with water's boiling temp...) I also use Temp Gauge (from the ap store) to watch temps. I've had my mac no more than 2 months, and noticed right away it got super hot when doing almost anything with it. Even youtube or hulu raise to 100c within seconds. I'm scared to play any games on it at all, which is a total bummer as I went with the stronger hardware so I could do some light gaming...

I took it to Apple and they checked it out and say they "could not replicate the issue" which is odd, as almost anything I do gets it over 90-100c. They did a factory reset and told me it might be because I transferred a bunch of music files from my other pro. Really? Are they really that fragile that music files corrupt the entire machine so it overheats? This was not a problem before... I have not put any files back onto this machine but it still runs super hot.

The fact that multiple peeps at Apple have reported no familiarity with the fact that these run hot (even though it's all over these and other forums) and were not able to see what I was talking about when I brought it in worries me. I bought this as I needed something more than my Air for school work, and am worried it won't last long if it runs so hot all the time. Of course this is the one time I didn't get Applecare as I've never needed it on my several other macs... fml lol.

Hopefully they run a patch for the OS or something that fixes this? Fingers crossed... : /

I've decided to ignore the temps and use my macbook balls out. Then again, I have applecare. I've spent dozens of hours playing games at high temperatures and it doesn't seem to have affected the performance of the macbook. Once it cools down and then I start using it for web browsing or whatever there is no problem.

Maybe it's blasting my machine but I got so sick of worrying about it and tip-toeing around what I bought my computer for. I do notice that it doesn't regulate the heat quite as well in bootcamp. A few times it started to smell like burning plastic. Not sure what's up with that. Still performs well. Once something actually appreciably breaks I will go to apple care.

Btw, sorry about your "genius" experience. That sounds mega-frustrating it obviously has nothing to do with music files they just have no idea and don't want to give out free computers.

Hi guys,

I have the same problems as you described. more than that realized we are not alone !

I have recently bought MacBook Pro (15-inch Retina Mid 2014) - Intel Core i7-4870HQ. Gradually, realized the CPUs temperature seem higher that I expected. Exactly the same as the situation you had / have.

this is more than a year when you started this discussion, I wondering if you could give us an update about your MPB. Do you still have it ?

In the near future, is it going to cause a serious failure for my MBP ?

Hi, I've recently bought MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) and also have noticed that it gets uncomfortably hot when doing software development or watching flash videos. My Core i7 CPU temperature hits over 100 degrees Centigrade.

What helped me is the iStat Menus (I'm using version 5.11). There's a "Fan Control" options that let's you choose an Active Set from one of Off/Default/Medium/High. When setting it to High, the temperatures go down very quickly but fan gets loud (as it hit's over 8000 RPM). I guess it's the compromise between loudness and temperature that you need to make. Though still it's nice that I can easily switch between different fan modes, depending if I'm using notebook on my lap or on the table.

Man thanks for this! I have a MBP 2010. Anything flashed based or any TV that I stream online makes my MBP soooo hot. A £2000 mac that can't stream TV yet my £159 android tablet doesn't have an issue and stays really cool. *****!

I just downloaded the iStats trial programme and I"m currently streaming Sky Sports TV as I type. My temperature went down from 101 to 55 degrees as soon as I set the fans too high. At the mo it's bouncing from 58 - 63 degrees. I'm using the 14 day trial but I may well upgrade as this is the first thing that has worked in 6 years. So basically guys..TURN UP THE FANS! Awesome find!

Just to let you know that I'm not company based etc..you can find me here http://www.onlineradioschool.com/

Ashley

I have just been experiencing this and tried to find reason .

I just completely shut down and rebooted and this seems to have worked , i find I get this with my iPhone occasionally and it fixes that.