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Another temperature question

msjones

msjones

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 18, 2007
429
4
Nottinghamshire, UK
Hi all,

Hope everyone had a brilliant Christmas & New Year.

I bought a black MacBook in the sales, really good deal, and I prefer them over the aluminum. But again I have temperature worries. Has apple actually released any documentation on safe temperature for there hardware?

Anyway here's my story.

I have installed UT2004 on my MacBook, and I am getting temperatures between 70-85C when in game, and the CPU is only at half load. Is this safe to be running the game at these temps?

My idle temp is the usual 35-55C for average use: IM, FF, VMWARE etc.

I use SMC control and set the default fans to 2500RPM and have a profile for when I am gaming maxing the fans out at 6200RPM but still the higher temps when playing UT.

I know the MB is not a gaming machine, but UT2004 is such an old engine there should be no issues running on MB hardware, just a little tense about the temps.
 
kastenbrust

kastenbrust

macrumors 68030
Dec 26, 2008
2,890
0
North Korea
Dont use SMC fan control unless you have a problem, just let the bios control the fans naturally when gaming, however 70-85C is well within the normal operating temps for a Macbook, even cool, mine gets to 100C ripping DVD's, and about 90C when gaming.
 
F

fishmoose

macrumors 68000
Jul 1, 2008
1,851
346
Sweden
Yeah mine gets way more hot than that sometimes, macbooks can really get hot!

I could recommend you to buy an laptop cooling pad, they can keep the temperature down of your laptop.

There are different models out there, i'm just in the process of picking one out for myself.
 
msjones

msjones

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 18, 2007
429
4
Nottinghamshire, UK
kastenbrust said:
Dont use SMC fan control unless you have a problem, just let the bios control the fans naturally when gaming, however 70-85C is well within the normal operating temps for a Macbook, even cool, mine gets to 100C ripping DVD's, and about 90C when gaming.
Click to expand...

So are you saying don't use SMC at all?

I am just a little concious with temps, this is my 3rd macbook in 10 months, others have died on me for unknown reasons.
 
L

lxuser

macrumors newbie
Mar 11, 2008
21
0
msjones said:
So are you saying don't use SMC at all?

I am just a little concious with temps, this is my 3rd macbook in 10 months, others have died on me for unknown reasons.
Click to expand...

There shouldnt be a problem with using SMC fan control at all. all it is doing is resetting your macbooks minimum fan settings, something many of us do here (myself included, I run usually at 2400rpm by default). With SMC fan control on your computer will still scale the speeds as needed to cool your macbook you use more and more processor intensive things.

That said, my macbook will usually peak @ around 65-70 for the games I play. I will also usually set SMC to run at "higher rpm" before I start the game which runs the fan around 4500 rpms i believe.
 
kastenbrust

kastenbrust

macrumors 68030
Dec 26, 2008
2,890
0
North Korea
lxuser said:
There shouldnt be a problem with using SMC fan control at all. all it is doing is resetting your macbooks minimum fan settings, something many of us do here (myself included, I run usually at 2400rpm by default). With SMC fan control on your computer will still scale the speeds as needed to cool your macbook you use more and more processor intensive things.

That said, my macbook will usually peak @ around 65-70 for the games I play. I will also usually set SMC to run at "higher rpm" before I start the game which runs the fan around 4500 rpms i believe.
Click to expand...

Its up to you really, the only reason i suggested to not use SMC was because my last MBP overheated and started smoking out the vents while playing COD4 (Mac Edition) and i had a manual fan control similar to SMC running at the time, and i took it to an Apple store in London to see what was wrong and they told me usually they would replace it for me as it was only 10 days old, but their 'tests' had shown certain hardware tampering software had been running and caused the problem and now my warranty wasn't valid so I had to buy a new one.
 
msjones

msjones

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 18, 2007
429
4
Nottinghamshire, UK
Well I am back, I got friendly with an apple engineer at a computer fair at the end of last year.

We have just had the macbook apart and surprised to find that there is hardly ANY thermal grease on the heat sink at all!

After repasting and rebuilding my average temp (Web, IM, VM) is 35-45C and load is down to 70-75C so there is a big change in temps.
 
kastenbrust

kastenbrust

macrumors 68030
Dec 26, 2008
2,890
0
North Korea
msjones said:
Well I am back, I got friendly with an apple engineer at a computer fair at the end of last year.

We have just had the macbook apart and surprised to find that there is hardly ANY thermal grease on the heat sink at all!

After repasting and rebuilding my average temp (Web, IM, VM) is 35-45C and load is down to 70-75C so there is a big change in temps.
Click to expand...

Apples hardly ever use thermal paste, too much is really bad, and too much is any more than 1mm thick.
 
msjones

msjones

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 18, 2007
429
4
Nottinghamshire, UK
What i'm talking about it that there was literally about half of the CPU and GPU covered. And that was it, the other was half bare contact with the copper, definitely not good. The paste as been evenly applied and the results are really good.
 
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