Fan issue

I use my 2012 mini as a DAW. Not had any trouble with it at all till yesterday. A program appeared locked up--a unusual thing and I checked my temps and saw my CPU was at 196 F & the fan was only spinning at 1800 rpm. I shut it down, disconnected everything & took the bottom cover off to see if it was really hot. Fan is clean with nothing obstructing air-flow.

It was hot to the touch along the baffle.

So I hooked monitor back up to it and booted into the hardware test. Everything was normal, no problems found. I reset the PRAM & SMC, booted up to see the CPU temp at 150 F--about 30+ degrees higher than normal. The fan would not spin above 1800-1805 rpms no matter how hot the CPU.

So I downloaded smc fan control and with it can increase the speed of the fans which lowers cpu temp. Still, I am not happy with this situation.

I did upgrade to 10.8.3 the other day with no apparent issues that I could find. The fan thing started the evening after that update. I worked all yesterday with the machine without any problems till the heat increase started last evening.

Any suggestions?

philipma1957 said:

did you keep a 10.8.2 version just in case 10.8.3 has a bug?

if you did run the 10.8.2 and see if the fan issue happens. if you did not it is more complicated to troubleshoot.

Click to expand...

Slapping myself for not taking the time to setup a partition to test 10.8.3. I don't have a 10.8.2 version...

benwiggy said:

The Mini will run hot and its fan will run hard if the CPU maxes out.

Check Activity Monitor to see what, if anything, is pushing the CPU hard.

Click to expand...

True enough that it will run hot if maxed out. Sadly, the CPU was running at 1% of capacity when the temp spikes occurred even after a reboot where nothing I've installed was starting up at boot till I installed the smc fan control.

All that aside, if the fan was increasing it's rpm's when cpu temps increased then it wouldn't have gotten so hot in the 1st place. I have the fan running via smc control at 2350 rpm's & that seems to be doing the job at this point. The issue is, what's changed that a fan control program is needed now when there was no need prior to last evening.

Running extended AHT

47 minutes into the test the fan is running fast enough I can hear it from door entering the room. That suggests to me the fans are working just fine when told to work. SMH...disliking Apple's policy of forcing us to use the "newest" OS when we buy a Mac right about now.