CPU temp goes up to 65 on 2009 Mac Pro

unless it breaks, dont worry about it

you cant oc a mac so id really woulnt stress

my desktop with a quad will max at around 72C and my laptop will hit 90C and they are fine for the last 2.5 and 3 years respectively

Computers get hot and notebooks more so. It's a fact of life.

Since it's summer drop the ambient room temperature as well. I was getting higher than normal readings until I popped the window AC in for the summer.

get a can of compressed air and clean out your fans. that might bring temps down a few deg as well

edit: just saw its 2 weeks old....dust probably isnt a problem

Nehalem runs hot. I've had mine just short of 80C, but it was heavily loaded, and like you, the ambient was high. No need to panic.

The mouse would be a separate issue IMO.

My core temp (Not heatsink temp) hits 90C (70C heatsink) if I leave it under Apples control.

I use my own Mac Pro Fan Control software now.

Core load is at 30C ambient 100% all cores: 75C core, 55C heatsink.

A CPU can handle well over 100. What are you worrying about?

Cindori said:

A CPU can handle well over 100. What are you worrying about?

Click to expand...

I'll assume you mean 100C, and core temp, not the heatsink temps. Otherwise the CPU will have a rather short life.

dukebound85 said:

get a can of compressed air and clean out your fans. that might bring temps down a few deg as well

edit: just saw its 2 weeks old....dust probably isnt a problem

Click to expand...

Now if the Mac Pro only had dust filters...

msmth928 said:

...the last few days I noticed the mouse button not working properly, sometimes I need to click twice for it to actually work, and if I was holding down the left button to drag, it kinda lost it's connection (so while dragging and moving things around the desktop they'd stop while the cursor still moved as I was still moving the mouse... and the mouse button was still pressed in all that time).

Click to expand...

Sounds like your mouse is the PITA here; try a different mouse. Buttons go out, it happens, just did on me mum's computer.

Eidorian said:

Now if the Mac Pro only had dust filters...

Click to expand...

+1 A slide in air filter just like those tower fans/air filtration units would do wonders...but also cut down circulation I 'spose.

Black107 said:

+1 A slide in air filter just like those tower fans/air filtration units would do wonders...but also cut down circulation I 'spose.

Click to expand...

I don't see much of a problem with the huge fans they use. The bigger worry might be users not cleaning them.

The temps being posted here aren't good. I guess some of you are getting TCC activation without
realizing it. This is really dumb! It looks like Apple screwed up the 2009 line as bad or worse than
previous lines. What's wrong with those guys? A proper cooling solution just isn't that hard to design!
TDP (measured max at TCASE) for the Gainestown X5550 (95W TDP) processor is 81C for profile B.
Profile B basically relies on the processor's TCC to make sure it doesn't crash or worse break the
part. Ideally you never want your processor to approach this temperature. The max limit for the
saner safer profile A is 75C. The Bloomfield W3520 (130W TDP) the thread starter's processor, has
a listed TCASE max of 67.9C. Both of these assume an ambient testing model of less than 43.2C of
course and more suitably are performed in the low 30's.

Here's the graph from Intel showing both profiles for the X5550 (or really any of the X5500 series chips):



Intel says:


Digital Thermal Sensor reports a relative die temperature as an offset from TCC activation temperature.
DTS is used for real-time thermal specification compliance. So for example a DTS of -30 in the case of
the W3520 processor would imply a processor temperature of 37.9C. Look at the graph from Intel for
the W3500 series pasted below, and tell me Apple isn't on some kind of mind-numbing drugs. According
to Intel's table data an ambient temperature of 24C (your typical room level) would imply that the graph
would begin at 600 RPM and increase to about 2000 RPM at DTS 0 (just before the processor starts scaling
itself down).



Your machine was about at DTS -5 with an ambient of 33 you say? So I ask you; Were your fans spinning
at anything close to 2300 RPM? You would know it for sure if they were. Even 2000 RPM is pretty noticeable.

Apple, you lamers!

Solution: We have to do it ourselves with smcFanControl.


.

msmth928 said:

Argh the mouse thing is happening again!! Think I will do a fresh install tomorrow just in case it's some conflict somewhere.

Tesselator, I've never seen the fans go over 900rpm, right now the temp is 58, (ambient 33) with fans at 856rpm (boosta 856, exhaust 599, intake 599, pci 904, power supply 599).

Is pci the gpu fan? (HD4870) seems to be running the fastest..

Click to expand...

Because the GPU fan isn't under Apple's control (I think)! So it runs at the proper speed.

But no. The PCI fan, the exhaust, and the intake basically work together for the ambient temp. The "PCI" is slightly focused on or around the PCI slot area. For your processor temp you're only concerned with BOOSTA and the basic ambient temperature. According to intel with your core temp at 58C and ambient at 33 your BOOSTA fan should be at about 1500 RPM. 58C is too hot. I could understand if it were an inexpensive home theater system and you didn't mind running it hot as a trade-off for optimal acoustics. But for reading mail or working in PS where loads are 50% or less that's on the crazy side of nuts. It just heats up the other more heat sensitive components inside your machine. For typical workloads like I assume you're doing you want your processor cores to average around 35C ~ 45C at most and your heat sinks should be about 5C to 10C less than that. You want your ambient to be within a few degrees of room temperature. This is the ideal you should try for anyway. Your procs should NOT be running hotter than an X5355 which is what I'm running and my temps look like this:

Heatsink A: 33C
Heatsink B: 34C
Highest (of 8) CPU Core: 46C
Lowest (of 8) CPU Core: 35C
Ambient (inside the case): 27C
Current Room temperature: 25.5C

On the mouse thing I've no idea but usually these things are not heat or software related. Bad mouse? Loose cable? <shrug>

Arn't the Intel spec sheets based on the silly little heatsinks you get with the chips not the custom designed heatsinks in the MP?

As for limiting performance, in windows it still turbo boosts even with the chips hitting 80+C under 100% HT load.

Apple might have got extra special high temp chips.

The heatsinks in the Mac Pro (esp the quad) are bigger than any heatsink i've ever had. (and i've had extreme air for many years in my PCs...)

Concorde Rules said:

Arn't the Intel spec sheets based on the silly little heatsinks you get with the chips not the custom designed heatsinks in the MP?

Click to expand...

Yeah, but I dunno it I would call them "silly" or not. Here's the one designed for the 3500 series which is processor the OP has.




And here's the one for the 5500 series:

Notice the dual triple-pass alcohol/wick heatpipes and the custom fan shroud.

As for limiting performance, in windows it still turbo boosts even with the chips hitting 80+C under 100% HT load.

Click to expand...

Well, this is contrary to Intel's design which I believe is in the microcode and chipset alike. It might officially be in turbo mode but at 80c (or 75c depending) but the processor has fully scaled down via TCC at that temperature. You can even benchmark the differences if you'd like. The performance hit is very pronounced.

Apple might have got extra special high temp chips.

Click to expand...

LOL! I suppose anything is possible but I highly doubt it.

The heatsinks in the Mac Pro (esp the quad) are bigger than any heatsink i've ever had. (and i've had extreme air for many years in my PCs...)

Click to expand...

Yeah, but the design is extremely poor and as Nanofrog pointed out in another thread, this may actually be a detriment and not an advantage. Bigger ≠ Better.

Shrug, my MBP is currently sitting at 97, with fans at 4100 rpm. No fan control for me. I've seen my CPU go up to 100 (maybe a couple more) every now and then. Since the last fan firmware, my fan doesn't go up much past 4000 (pretty quiet), compared to before where it often went to its "apple max" at 6000 (noisy!).
So in conclusion, if an Intel CPU in a MBP can happily hit 100+, a similar CPU in a desktop is certainly not going to be damaged at 65.

No one is talking about damage and mobile parts are a completely different story than desktop parts. Completely.

You might as well compare the OP's chip to a pizza oven and make the same conclusions.

Tesselator said:

No one is talking about damage and mobile parts are a completely different story than desktop parts. Completely.

You might as well compare the OP's chip to a pizza oven and make the same conclusions.

Click to expand...

Care to explain?

It was my understanding that both mobile and desktop parts were both manufactured using silicon, which has a melting point of over 1400˚C. It was also my understanding that the new Mac Pro cooling system was vastly superior to my Macbook Pro, which would suggest that should the two CPUs be the same temperature, the surrounding infrastructure would be kept at a far lower temperature in the Mac Pro than my notebook, thereby meaning things were less likely to break. Finally, it was also my understanding that being a desktop, fragile components would not be confined to a 1"x10"x12" "pizza oven", but would be considerably spaced out, away from major sources of heat.

So exactly how is a machine that is designed to remove large amounts of heat as quickly as possible with almost no regards to space or noise going to be damaged by a comparatively low temperature, when a machine that is designed to be tiny and quiet, to hell with cooling, is not damaged by heat that would cook an egg?

And I don't see any other reason to worry about temperature other than damage. If your computer is hotter than normal, and not being damaged by it, it simply means your computer is wasting slightly less energy in cooling.

And about the mouse, if it's a wireless mouse, can I assume you've tried replacing the batteries?

Erasmus said:

Care to explain?

I don't see any other reason to worry about temperature other than damage.

Click to expand...

System Stability.
Operation Speed.
Operation Cost.
Operation Noise.
System Cost.
Affected Components.
etc.

Mobile parts are engineered for different purposes and have very different abilities and thermal profiles than desktop parts.

Well, considering the Nehalem XEON is basically just an i7 with ECC the temp of 65°C to 75°C at full load is common but of course not nice. An option would be to use the low voltage XEONs but these are slow with only up to 2.4GHz but would make a nice entry level MP octad compared to the 2.26GHz.

Still weird that the MP does run at high temps with all the fans. Where are the times a Workstation was considered to be noisy but therefor cool and stable?

It seems that Windows has an "Force Turbo Boost" switch, otherwise it wouldn´t allow Turbo Boost at 80°C IMO.

TheSilencer said:

It seems that Windows has an "Force Turbo Boost" switch, otherwise it wouldn´t allow Turbo Boost at 80°C IMO.

Click to expand...

Are we really sure that it does? I find the remark in post #17 questionable.

BTW, I like your entry level octad idea! Good thinking. --> Apple?

I'm not sure if I concur with the Mac Pro not having adequate heat sinks and cooling. The heat sink and cooling system in the Mac Pro, on initial view, seem superior to the one provided by Intel in the Core i7 retail box. The Mac Pro's heat sink is much larger and seems more substantial, with two fans cooling the CPU bay (one pulls air in, the other pushes air out). I have replaced the Nehalem chip in my Quad with an i7 975 Extreme and the temps have never gone above 40 C. In fact, most of the time they hover around 38 or 39 C. Even when taxing it in Photoshop and other applications, I haven't seen it go over 39 C lately.

A great way to get your CPU temperature up is if you remove the side panel from your Mac Pro. Doing so disrupts how the cooling system is designed, and will result in higher temperatures. Apple also recommends against having any open slot protectors, as this will also alter the thermal characteristics of the interior in a negative way. I don't do video or sound editing on my system, so I'm not taxing all cores for large periods of time. Maybe if I did the temperatures would be higher, but everything seems perfectly fine with a CPU that runs 25% faster than stock with a higher TDH. At least from my experience, there is no reason to believe that the Mac Pro cooling system is deficient in any way.

I am hardly an expert at any of this, but I have rolled up my sleeves to dive into the Mac Pro's interior with my CPU and various other upgrades recently. From what I can see, the Mac Pro case is designed with incredible attention to detail as far as PC cases are concerned. Your typical off-the-shelf cases, fans, and heat sinks appear to throw everything they have at the CPU while Apple's philosophy seems much more rooted in "quality over quantity". The cooling systems for the PCI slots is totally separate from the CPU subsystem. By having two fans in the CPU bay -- one pushing and one pulling -- you have a much steadier, more stable air flow requiring smaller fans to do the same amount of work as a larger fan that is simply blowing air. Also, air is channeled effectively from the front to the rear of the CPU bay with little leakage into the surrounding case.

My RAM also has heat spreaders, which helps to keep things cooler than without. Perhaps my temps will spike into the stratosphere if I were to do some video editing or compression, but so far everything seems extremely stable and very well designed. I can't think of a single PC that is as well designed inside as a Mac Pro. But then again, I lack much of the technical knowledge most of you guys have. This is all just based on my limited exposure to the Mac Pro interior.