Did Gaming Ruin My MacBook?

If you drive a car constantly it wears out much faster than one that is driven on weekends only.

Your dad has a point - running a game on a Mac will cause the GPU & CPU to run hot & will make them fail quicker. Gaming causes the Mac to heat up so the fans will run (pulling more dust through the Mac, the battery will also run through more cycles when used constantly (battery 'buffers' the power supply), the PSU has to supply more current…

You are not being 'nerdy' leaving the Mac on overnight to rack up in game time, you are just reducing the lifespan of your Mac to gain achievements that only exist on the internet. If you are serving for other players you should consider if they would contribute to buying a new Mac.

It is the same basic calculation bitcoin miners make : how much money can be earned by the amount of electricity & the initial hardware investment. The most cost effective way would be to farm game time on the cheapest desktop PC instead of buying a machine that isn't suited for constant high intensity usage.

Place your hands over the machine next time you run CS:GO on a laptop you will feel the heat dissipating from it, then quit the game & give it 30 minutes to cool & compare to the idle state. Activity Monitor will also show CPU, memory & power usage.

Electronic components are just like mechanical ones - they have limited lifespans & high usage reduces the time to failure.

Overheating can definitely cause problems, however... The MacBook has numerous heat sensors and the operating system should have slowed down and/or shut down the computer long before any physical damage occurred.

Do you have any software installed that would overclock the CPU/GPU or otherwise controlled fanspeeds?

will1515 wrote:

So basically I should limit myself on how much time I let the game run and take breaks occasionally because it could cause overheating?

Yes. It's also better for your own health to get up and do something else from time to time.

It depends on what the point of the Mac is for you. If you brought it to farm game time then you should just do that & accept that it will eventually fail. I suspect other models or PC's are more cost efficient at doing that job. You could probably buy 2-3 cheap desktop PC's as servers for the same cost of one Macbook Pro?

It's a cost vs value equation. How much money to spend vs how much value you get.

If the Mac is meant to be a tool that lets you get work done then limiting gaming time seems reasonable to me. It does not seem reasonable to run a laptop as a game server to me. It can play games but it isn't game server hardware that can run all the time (8-10 hours overnight is excessive). You could probably kill the Mac by running large after effects renders all day too because that is also taxing on the CPU & GPU.

NOTE: I didn't say the Mac was overheating - I think it was running within the safe limits as far as you described. The Mac would shutdown & complain as others pointed out if it was overheating. Normal limits will still put wear on a machine, running near the upper limits just increases the wear rate.

No gaming would not actually do this

Hi,

It sounds a lot more like a defective battery.

Does running hot help anything? Of course not, but it shouldn't have caused anything like the Apple Store says.