Penryn Macbook heat and fans

Hi,

After being reading macrumors for two years and I have finally purchased a new Penryn Macbook 2.4.

So far my only criticism about it is related to the heat and fan noise. When I use it for non intensive applications it is usually fine, being the heat at the CPU around 50C and the fans noise barely noticeable (although if everything is in silence you can hear them in the background as a fluorescent light).

The problem comes when I do more intensive applications like playing WoW. Here the CPU heat goes to 80C where the fans reach the maximum speed producing lot of noise and keeping the temperature between 73 and 80 C.

My problem is not only the huge noise made continuously by the fans while playing, but also that I cannot imagine what would happen to the laptop after one year playing frequently.

Do you think this is normal? fan noise and heat 70-80C playing? (running on battery with maximize battery settings)

Is there any way to underclock the CPU force it to run at slower speed while playing? I am sure I can play WoW (or other old generation game) at a decent frame-rate running at half of the CPU speed.

It is really a shame that such a great computer has this issue with the heat.

eXan said:

Do a search. This question raises every day here.

No, this isn't an issue. Computers get hot, nothing wrong with it. 70-80C is even fairly low, compared to 80-85C I get on my older MacBook, so be happy

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Yes, I searched already but I couldn't find how to underclock the penryn's CPU, apart from the trick of taking out the battery.

I must say I am more concerned about the fan noise than about the heat.

eXan said:

This seems strange to me why you want to underclock it. You buy a CPU for X money, but you don't want it to run at its intended speed. Question: why spend X money if you could saved when getting a slower CPU?

The solution I can give you is either get a laptop stand with coolers on it, or set a framerate limit in the game you want to use less resources.

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The answer for the first question is easy. I want macosx in a laptop, and the macbook 2.1 comes with combodrive, so my only option was macbook 2.4Ghz.

Also, as far as I know, a C2D 1.5 running at 1.5 Ghz always gets hotter than a C2D 2.2 running at 1.5 Ghz.

Thanks for the tip of the framerate, I will check it out for WoW. In any case I wish I had a general solution, application independent.

herman238 said:

Yeah i'm also interested as to the performance of WoW or any game on the macbook? What kind of framerates can one expect to see whilst running WoW?

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Hi,

It goes really smooth, playing with medium-low settings. I play with some addons enabled and I dont see any frame drop or anything. I will install Titan Panel to measure the exact FPS, but for sure they are over 35.

If I set maxfps to 24 that is enough for me, I manage to decrease the temperature to an average of 67C (running on batteries with no laptop cooler). As a curiosity I will say that it is the wireless card the component that gets hotter (average of 76C).

Answering your quest I would say that the new penryn 2.4Ghz with the x3100 and 2GB of RAM is more than perfectly capable of running WoW at medium settings. For me the only issue is the heat