There have been lots of discussion and rumors lately about the 2011 MBPs overheating. People hear about "excessive thermal paste" and assume that's the reason their computer seems hot. I've googled this. A number of individuals have reported that replacing their thermal paste with arctic silver and getting 10-degree reduction in temperature. Unfortunately, they don't always report whether that's in degrees C or F. On the other hand, a few professionals have investigated this issue and found much less significant improvements.
One common reason for an apparently idle system to get hot is that it is not in fact idle. Spotlight indexing is a resource hog that uses significant CPU time. In fact, a number of users have reported that their brand new MBP was overly hot until they let spotlight run its course... then it was cool as a cucumber. Not everyone thinks to check to see what their computer is doing.
So, how about we conduct an informal poll to see if we can find the underlying cause.
For those of you who feel that your Mac is overly hot when idle, please wait until you find that the computer is hot, and open the "Activity Monitor" app. In the lower portion of the window, select the CPU tab, and in the upper right, be sure "All Processes" is selected. Watch it for 15 or 30 seconds and then report (a) about what the total CPU load is (in percent), and (b) which processes are using the most CPU. Be sure to use Activity Monitor and not iStat since iStat has bugs that makes it misreport process names. However, iStat would be good so that you can (c) report the CPU temperature. In degrees Celsius.
For those of you who are finding the machine to be excessively hot under heavy load, please tell us (a) what you're running, (b) the total CPU load (in percent), and (c) the CPU temperature. Again, please use Celsius so that we're using the same language.
This poll might be useful for those of you who have already bought a new machine to give you an idea of whether or not you have a real problem. It'll also help those who have not yet bought (but want to) to decide is Apple does indeed have heat and quality issues or if the horror stories are mostly from people who haven't looked at Activity Monitor.
Someone is going to have a machine that is unbearably hot and/or is inexplicably hot when idle. That person is an outlier with a defective machine that needs to be replaced. The rest of us just victims of Apple's possibly inefficient background processes.
Thanks for your help.
One common reason for an apparently idle system to get hot is that it is not in fact idle. Spotlight indexing is a resource hog that uses significant CPU time. In fact, a number of users have reported that their brand new MBP was overly hot until they let spotlight run its course... then it was cool as a cucumber. Not everyone thinks to check to see what their computer is doing.
So, how about we conduct an informal poll to see if we can find the underlying cause.
For those of you who feel that your Mac is overly hot when idle, please wait until you find that the computer is hot, and open the "Activity Monitor" app. In the lower portion of the window, select the CPU tab, and in the upper right, be sure "All Processes" is selected. Watch it for 15 or 30 seconds and then report (a) about what the total CPU load is (in percent), and (b) which processes are using the most CPU. Be sure to use Activity Monitor and not iStat since iStat has bugs that makes it misreport process names. However, iStat would be good so that you can (c) report the CPU temperature. In degrees Celsius.
For those of you who are finding the machine to be excessively hot under heavy load, please tell us (a) what you're running, (b) the total CPU load (in percent), and (c) the CPU temperature. Again, please use Celsius so that we're using the same language.
This poll might be useful for those of you who have already bought a new machine to give you an idea of whether or not you have a real problem. It'll also help those who have not yet bought (but want to) to decide is Apple does indeed have heat and quality issues or if the horror stories are mostly from people who haven't looked at Activity Monitor.
Someone is going to have a machine that is unbearably hot and/or is inexplicably hot when idle. That person is an outlier with a defective machine that needs to be replaced. The rest of us just victims of Apple's possibly inefficient background processes.
Thanks for your help.
