2011 Macbook Pro 13.3 Overheating *VIDEO*

[NickZac]

Okay...I have to apologize to the people with the 13 inch MBPs for just saying the systems run hot. It seems like there is some sort of heat issue with the 13 inch that does not affect the 15 or 17; my 15 2.3 is the coolest running laptop I have ever owned (and I've had quite a few). The processes that are running relative to the heat being produced does not seem proportional, and provided something else is not sucking up the CPU resources, it sounds like some sort of design issue may exist.

 

[mizzoucat]

Okay...I have to apologize to the people with the 13 inch MBPs for just saying the systems run hot. It seems like there is some sort of heat issue with the 13 inch that does not affect the 15 or 17; my 15 2.3 is the coolest running laptop I have ever owned (and I've had quite a few). The processes that are running relative to the heat being produced does not seem proportional, and provided something else is not sucking up the CPU resources, it sounds like some sort of design issue may exist.

It's clearly software related as most people are reporting zero issues while running Windows in Bootcamp.

 

[McHater]

Does anyone know the name of that widget the original poster used to bring up all the temps & other computer status info?

 

[daneoni]

^
http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatpro/

 

[Lennyvalentin]

Just because the computer doesnt shut down doesn't mean everything is ok. Over time heat and heat cycles kill electronics. I still think back to the original xbox 360 and over time all the problems they had due to heat cycles.

The original Xbox360s died because they were poorly designed, using bad engineering, poorly designed electronics employing cheap, low-quality parts and materials. Sandy bridge processors are designed and built by Intel, an entirely different ballgame entirely. Say what you will about the company's business ethics and whatnot (not terribly impressive IMO), but the class of their designs is 2nd to none. Intel has the most cutting edge semiconductor tech on the planet.

SB CPUs are perfectly fine up to ~105C, 80C or even 90 is nothing to worry about. It's within their design envelope, and statistically the chips will last longer at that temp than the rest of the laptop. Particulary the battery, which, when it wears out you most likely won't be using that lappy much anymore anyway since they tend to be very expensive to replace and by that time the unit will be obsolete (plus have grubby keyboard, maybe scratched/banged up) and generally not be worth spending that much money on anyway.

The reason SB chips get hotter than previous chips is largely that they're simply faster and more proficient at running program code. The more transistors switch (IE, the more work they do), the more power they draw. And power turns into 100% heat in integrated circuits...

All the parts are supposedly designed to handle these temps but my MBP GPU failed from heat prematurely but was designed badly and there for fixed by apple.

Faulty parts will always occur in a mass-production environment, and at least some sandy bridge MBPs had excessive amounts of thermal goop applied to its chips, leading to poor heat transfer and thus heat buildup (meaning manufacturing or quality control issue, not faulty design). Your unit may have suffered from the same, it's of course hard to say for sure without taking apart the unit in question...

 

[McHater]

Thanks to Daneoni for the info.

 

[Roman2K~]

My 13" 2011 MBP has arrived today. I'm not at home right now but I can't wait to try it out.

Tonight or tomorrow night, I will take notes of temperatures before and after thermal paste re-application (like I did on my 15" 2011 MBP), as well as take pictures of the thermal gunk mess I expect to discover in there.

People in this topic don't seem too keen on re-applying thermal paste, as opposed to people in the 15"-related thread, but hopefully my results will be satisfying enough that some will give it a shot .

@Lennyvalentin
Thanks for the details about temperature thresholds.

 

[Roman2K~]

Yesterday, I replaced the stock thermal paste with Arctic Cooling MX-4 in a 13" 2011 MBP (i7). Here are the results and some photos.

(Running on battery, no external monitor plugged in.)

Before:



Idle: 48°C, stable, 2000 RPM
Maximum load temperature: 93°C, stable, 6200 RPM
YouTube, 1080p in full screen (Buck Bunny excerpt): 81°C, stable, 2000 RPM

I expected a lot worse. It was silent no matter what I threw at it, except for the CPU-burn program (4 threads incrementing counters and displaying an increment rate on a regular basis). Even then, compared to the 15", there's only one fan so generally quieter, and not as whiny, a whole lot more bearable.

It turned out, the thermal paste application wasn't so bad. A lot better than on the 15". Seeing that, I knew there wasn't a lot of room for improvement.

After:



(This is not an ideal comparison since I took the opportunity of having the case opened to replace the HDD with an SSD that had Mac OS X and a bunch of programs running in the background. So "After" temperatures are going to be higher.)

Idle : 50°C, stable, 2000 RPM
Maximum load temperature: 91°C, stable, 6200 RPM
YouTube, 1080p in full screen (Buck Bunny excerpt): 76°C, stable, 2000 RPM

Conclusion:

Just like on the 15", the re-application hasn't decreased temperatures that much (-2°C during full load, -5°C on YouTube 1080p -- though with more background apps after the new thermal paste).

What is excellent though, and makes it all worth it, is that the fan is now more efficient. Heat is now properly transfered to the heatsink, and removed by the fan. As a consequence, it needs to speed up above 2000 RPM less often, and when it does, temperatures decrease quicker.

The process of tearing the machine apart wasn't as smooth as on the 15" though. All because of the microphone (next to the MagSafe connector). The iFixit guide says to pull it out since it's just glued but I feared it wouldn't stick as well afterwards. So I had to work with the motherboard flipped to the right of the case. It wasn't so bad, just inconvenient.

In the end, I was lucky that the initial thermal paste application was almost alright, so there wasn't a lot of room for improvement. Still, replacing the original filth with MX-4 had made the machine even quieter overall by making the fan's work more efficient, and most importantly, now I know I am getting optimum cooling performance, every screw is in just tight enough, and every component is clean.

If you're getting temps like mine in the "Before" section, and are not confident in tearing your MBP apart, re-applying thermal paste is not worth it. Otherwise, I recommend to go ahead, if only to watch the beautiful, quality hardware that's inside.

 

[rmitchell248]

What you're not understanding is the difference in architecture between the two models. The 2010 13" model has a graphics chipset (NVIDIA 320M) that is discreet from the processor - meaning it is a physically different chip, mounted separately on the main logic board. The new 13" uses the Intel integrated solution which is on the same die as the CPU - ie, the CPU and GPU are part of the same chip.

When you watch a youtube video (or any Flash video), Flash offloads the playback of the video file to the GPU. The effect this has is that it decreases CPU load to be used for other tasks while the GPU renders the video. This is where the difference in architecture between the revisions comes in to play. On the old model, the processor will remain relatively cool and the GPU temperature will increase separately. On the new model as they are integrated when the GPU is under load, the CPU temperature will also increase because the are the same chip.

Just because you don't understand something does not mean it is faulty.

Pretty ignorant post from you there nufanec, You will see if you read on, that I clearly stated that the problem is the integrated GPU/CPU. I then state that I feel that they should have made improvements to the cooling system to compensate for this new design.

Your comments did not insult me, rather made you look like a .........

 

[NickZac]

If you're getting temps like mine in the "Before" section, and are not confident in tearing your MBP apart, re-applying thermal paste is not worth it. Otherwise, I recommend to go ahead, if only to watch the beautiful, quality hardware that's inside.

I imagine you are probably more skilled with thermal paste than the average person and so this is probably not a good idea for most users. It is also worth noting that it effectively voids your warranty if something occurs, and that users have reported doing this and then having complete and total computer failure.

 

[Jiten]

Heat issues with the MBP seem to pop up every revision (at least since the uni-body design).

The consensus is its not an immediate problem, but i agree...i've had too many laptops fail prematurely due to on-going thermal degradation...may never be a issue with the MBP, but my guess is the sloppy thermal paste from stock WILL eventually compound the issue.

Actually if you do some detective work, heat problems was an issue as early as the very first generation Core Duo Macbook Pro.

 

[daneoni]

^
Actually dates back to the Titanium PowerBooks.

Things have been much worse than they supposedly are now. People have it good nowadays and they don't even realize it.

 

[PwcrLinux]

^
Actually dates back to the Titanium PowerBooks.

Things have been much worse than they supposedly are now. People have it good nowadays and they don't even realize it.

Whoa.. KB melted looks like a "Forge Melter".. Yea same older dell lappy burned out in Japan cause explosion by overheat that trigger a battery exploded.

 

[Roman2K~]

I imagine you are probably more skilled with thermal paste than the average person and so this is probably not a good idea for most users. It is also worth noting that it effectively voids your warranty if something occurs, and that users have reported doing this and then having complete and total computer failure.

Like you said, warranty is voided *if* something bad occurs while messing with the internals. But frankly, components are sturdy, and cables are straightforward to unplug / re-plug (once you know which to pull, slide out and potentially unlock beforehand), I can't imagine how it would be possible to mess up.

 

[daneoni]

Whoa.. KB melted looks like a "Forge Melter"..

Nope. Not forged...three separate cases documented at the time.

 

[BlingBling]

Yesterday, I replaced the stock thermal paste with Arctic Cooling MX-4 in a 13" 2011 MBP (i7). Here are the results and some photos.

Judging by the photograph, in my opinion you put to much thermal paste. It should be a thin line or small pea, I also use mx-4. I have a MBP i5 2011 13" and I've gotten better results (my fans no longer hit 6200 rpm under full load), I idle at 41º, full load at 87º (5500 rpm). I make a thin line and let the heatsink smudge/spread the paste. I'm certain if you re-applied less thermal paste you'd get better results.

This is an example of how much thermal paste I use:

Here is a great video which shows how thermal paste spreads


Also, I did remove the microphone from the enclosure, it is held by a light glue, but pops out and back in easily. I also did not remove the battery as you can tilt the logic board out of the case, but the battery is always the first thing I unplug. Removing the cables the first time is tricky, but after that it becomes second nature (half an hour to tear-down and reassembly).

If you do make another attempt, let us know if you do get better results.

 

[NickZac]

Like you said, warranty is voided *if* something bad occurs while messing with the internals. But frankly, components are sturdy, and cables are straightforward to unplug / re-plug (once you know which to pull, slide out and potentially unlock beforehand), I can't imagine how it would be possible to mess up.

Yes, but it can be argued that user modification has reduced the reliability of a system or damaged the optimal functioning design and therefore, causing part ___ to fail. That ____ can be any part, not just the CPU.

 

[Maven1975]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

What version of flash were you using? 10.2?

 

[hokoonho]

hi, guys
I have my 13" mbp i7 and experienced overheat issue as well

This video shows mbp running win7. I test it with Google Chrome and running a WebGL website, and monitor with Intel Turbo Boost Monitor. The mbp perform well in the first 10 seconds, then overheat occur, then I take it infront of the Air-Con, it gain some speed. Finally, I put it on the desktop and overheat again.
In the test, no turbo boost, and finally, the CPU slow down to cool down

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFY2v-spG5M

 

[hokoonho]

The second video

I test it with Win7 and Super Pi, monitor with Intel TurboBoost Monitor and CPU-Z

I assign 3 different instant of Super Pi to run in three different virtual core...
with the fourth core idle, overheat occur and the CPU frequency start to drop...

This movie is in Chinese, but you guys will understand what I am doing, enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6S8t6MPGHw


The Third video run a Test in OSX, a 2006 Macbook and 2011 Macbook Pro

The 2006 Macbook is slow in the test but run without crash.
The 2011 Macbook pro run quite smooth but crash finally.
The video also in Chinese but some English explaination added

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYCkvXvBbbQ


You guys with 13" mbp i7 can try my test to see if you can crash your Macbook pro

do a google search "webgl aquarium" and you will found the Test
remember to change the option 50 -> 1000 fish

Enjoy the test and sorry for my poor English

 

[Roman2K~]

@BlingBling & NickZac
Sorry for the late responses, I don't think I have been notified of your replies.

@NickZac
I don't see how the "reliability of the system" could be reduced, nor how the "optimal functioning design" could be damaged in such a process (thermal paste re-application). To me, after the machine is put back together, it either works fully or it doesn't. If it does, it's in the same condition as before, or in this case, even better.

@BlingBling
Thanks for the advice, and your results. I realized I put too much afterwards. Upon mounting the heatsink, I checked to see if excess thermal paste would be pushed to the sides... and there was, a little. I'm satisfied with the result though. Also, I don't feel like re-opening it since it's my mom's now (I kept the 15" jewel for me ), she wouldn't notice the potential gain in cooling efficiency. Having said that, I might redo the 15" with MX-4 instead of MX-2 and try to apply even less paste as per your documented advice. That would happen in this thread.