13" Pro seems really hot, ideal operating temperature?

[mgartner0622]

While I was over at my parent's house, my father had me look at their MacBook Pro because he thought it felt hot. I bought it for them refurbished in April of 2010. It's the 2.26GHz 13" and I upgraded it to 8GB about a year ago. Anyways, the computer seems to IDLE at about 75˚ to 85˚ Celsius. I'm using it right now to type, and the palm-rests are warm to the touch. I took the bottom cover off, and blew out dust. The fan is working, if I use SMC fan control, I can turn the fan on all the way and clearly hear it.
I can't think of anything else to do, and I would like confirmation that this is not a normal operating temperature on this model. In comparison, my 2.5GHz i7 15" idles at around 50-55˚
Thanks for your help

 

[Dark Void]

That does not seem right as you suspect - I have a similar model and it idles around 28-35˚ Celsius. Not sure on how to fix the issue, I would have done and checked all of the things that you have - just offering some confirmation.

 

[mgartner0622]

Thanks. I thought those temperatures were above normal, and to have them more than double what you see seems to be a problem. I've been watching activity monitor to see if there's anything that's taxing the CPU, but so far everything has been fine.

 

[fteoath64]

Idle at 75-85 deg C ?.

This is burn temperature for the CPU maxing out without sufficient cooling from the fans. Not normal. You might want to replace the thermal paste that was applied between the CPU/gpu and the heatsink surfaces. Reaching them is rather hard but you can use ifixit procedures of teardown to see how you can reach those parts and use artic-silver thermal paste to reapply properly.

Most people have noticed way too much creamy white paste being applied by the factory. It seems the workers have no idea how the paste works and looks like they are serving food by coating way too much paste. It also pays to clean out the fan units using cue-tips dipped with isopropyl-alcohol solution and tissues to clean off the excesses. I even put a small drop of oil in the fan cores to lubricate those. Allow them to stand for some time under a few layers of tissues to clean off excess drops. But might not be necessary.

On idle, fans running between 1500-1800 rpm should yield 50-55 DegC. And fans should speed up quickly with usage especially playing video or gpu intensive programs.

Note: At 80 deg to 85 deg the CPU will do thermal throttling to slow down the frequency in order to control the heat itself. That is dangerously close to Max rated operating temp for the cpu.

 

[Queen6]

Have a look at what process`s are running via Activity Monitor, as something is clearly driving up the temperature. A runaway process can easily ramp up temperatures. Changing the thermal paste is not going to resolve your issue, it will only drop the temperature 5C - 8C tops assuming there actually an issue in the first place, and you may damage the machine in the process.

If anyone is syncing a Samsung phone with "kies" this app is renowned for generating runaway process and subsequent high temperatures. If you are unsure take a snapshot of Activity Monitor (sort by %CPU) and post here to get some more help.