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How well do Retina MacBook Pros cope with heat?

C

Chic0

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 16, 2008
370
36
UK
I have a late 2008 unibody MBP 15" with 2.53 Core2Duo and 4gb RAM. I've been thinking about replacing it for a while now for various reasons.

One of the reasons is the amount of heat it generates with only a few applications open. One of the main culprits seems to be flashed based games running in Safari or Chrome or media conversion using Handbrake or SoundConvertor. The laptop gets stupidly hot.

I know only a few people on here may already have their new rMBP machines, but how hot do they get compared to previous models?

Has anyone tried flash-based browser games such as Miniclip?

Are the fans quieter or just as loud?
 
Chic0 said:
I have a late 2008 unibody MBP 15" with 2.53 Core2Duo and 4gb RAM. I've been thinking about replacing it for a while now for various reasons.

One of the reasons is the amount of heat it generates with only a few applications open. One of the main culprits seems to be flashed based games running in Safari or Chrome or media conversion using Handbrake or SoundConvertor. The laptop gets stupidly hot.

I know only a few people on here may already have their new rMBP machines, but how hot do they get compared to previous models?

Has anyone tried flash-based browser games such as Miniclip?

Are the fans quieter or just as loud?
Click to expand...

I also have a Late 2008 unibody MBP and agree it gets insanely hot. I was in the Apple store playing with the MBPR yesterday and heat was one of my concerns. Unfortunately, in my scientific "run benchmarks and feel the bottom" test, the MBPR doesn't seem much better.

Cinebench seemed to do a pretty good job at stressing the CPU (or GPU), and after a few minutes the bottom of the system was hot to the touch. Like, "probably don't want to use this on my lap when wearing shorts hot".

I couldn't hear the fans at all, but again I was in the Apple store and it was pretty loud in there. Other reviews seem to say the fans are pretty quiet.

I ran the same extremely scientific tests on a new MBA and the bottom didn't get anywhere near as hot. Warm at most.

This was on the low end base MBPR.
 
Tu13es said:
I ran the same extremely scientific tests on a new MBA and the bottom didn't get anywhere near as hot. Warm at most.

This was on the low end base MBPR.
Click to expand...

hehehe......I like your descriptions. "probably don't want to use this on my lap when wearing shorts hot"......is self explanatory. Much clearer than any thermal measurements.

Thanks for the info, but like you said, that's not good news :( The base model rMBP is what I've been looking at.

At least the quieter fans is a step forward, but I'd rather the new machines ran cooler.

I wonder whether any rMBP owners can add their everyday use findings.
 
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/13/3082649/macbook-pro-review-retina-display-15-inch
"As for the heat and fan volume, per a suggestion from Marco Arment (Instapaper creator and friend of The Verge), we ran CPUTest for 12 minutes to see just how loud and hot we could get the machine. There’s good news and bad news: while the fan was surprisingly quiet — even in an apartment with closed windows and some light traffic and rain outside, I could barely hear it — the heat was in the ballpark of what we’d expect from our personal 2011 MacBook Pro. Which is to say, hot — particularly the metal rim around the ‘U’ key, which is about where the processor rests internally. It's hard to touch for more than a few seconds."
 
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