Screen Saver Makes Fan Go Fast?

Something I just noticed: My MBA was screen saving with the Arabesque screen saver, and I could hear the fan going like a bat out of hell. So I moved the trackpad and the screen saver went away. I immediately pulled up iStat Pro, and the fans were pegged at 6200 RPM and the CPU temp was around 150 degrees. Within just a few seconds of doing this, the CPU temp dropped a full 15 degrees and the fans began to slow down. After just a few minutes, the CPU temp was down to 122 degrees and the fans were back down to the usual 2500 or so RPM.

So, hypothesis: Anything that performs intensive screen processing, like a complicated screen saver, will cause the CPU to heat up. This in turn will cause the fans to speed up.

One test would be to not use a screen saver at all, but just let the screen go black. If the CPU doesn't have to push a ton of pixels around the screen, it shouldn't get hot, and the fans shouldn't come on.

Eric, good call on the choice of screen saver. Flurry doesn't seem to cause the CPU to heat up anywhere near as much, and the fans consequently stay slow.

BWhaler said:

Anyone remember when Apple used to manufacture high quality products? This is really getting painful.

Click to expand...

Well, I think this falls more into the category of "screen saver developer didn't care about CPU cycles when writing this thing". I would imagine that the code inside Arabesque could be optimized somehow to make it hit the CPU less intensely. If anyone from Apple is reading this: Get on it! I like Flurry OK, but would rather be using Arabesque... but not if it's going to hammer my machine like that.

When I checked my MBA this morning after letting it run Flurry all night, the fans were clocking a nice even 2500 RPM and CPU temp was still around 122. Seems like that is the "happy medium" for the MBA, at least on my machine.