i5 - i7 noticable heat and fan noise thread. The concensous is >

[Apple Expert]

Mine's going back, probably.

I bought my 13" i5 MBA 2 days ago, hoping to replace my 13" Macbook Pro from late 2009. I love how the thing looks, and its INCREDIBLY fast, but at a price.

The thing gets hot way too easy for my tastes. I have set the MBA and the MBP side-to-side running the EXACT same flash video on the exact same browsers, with nothing running in the background, and compared the results.

The MBA flies to 80+ Temperatures right away, and then proceeds to crank up the fans at 5500+ RPM, causing it to sound like a vacuum cleaner, and being too damn hot to handle comfortably. Meanwhile, playing the same video, the MBP is also reaching 70+ degrees, but it manages to keep the fans at around 2000 RPM, not making a single sound unless I press my ear onto the chassis.

I know it's the ultra slim form factor preventing proper heat dissipation on the MBA, but I personally can't stand wielding a immensely hot or noisy laptop.
If that's the price I have to pay for ultra slim-ness, I prefer the slightly fatter Macbook Pro.

Just my 2 cents, i'm 99% sure i'm returning it.

Sounds like you got a bad one. But I've done several side by side test and the i5 always was cooler. On average by about 5-10C. Might want to try an exchange to see if that fixes your problem.

 

[DrGeekFR]

I've been using an 11-inch i5 and i7 side by side for a few days now. The i7 definitely averages around 5 degrees C hotter when idling or for simple tasks (mail, iTunes, Safari), but that's the CPU temp reading; the bottom and most of the others are only a degree different and sometimes cooler than the i5. When the processor is taxed, they seem the same and the i7 gets cooler faster.

When you try time capsule with both of them, is the fan speed going very high ?
Do you think the i7 is more noisy than the i5 (due to the fan) ?

Thanks in advance for your answer

 

[jblock]

When you try time capsule with both of them, is the fan speed going very high ?
Do you think the i7 is more noisy than the i5 (due to the fan) ?

Thanks in advance for your answer

They both have the same data on them, about 80GB. They get up to 83 C at different points of the backup (which takes about an hour) with the fans getting to about 5,000. For neither is the heat or fan constant, going down to about 70 C during the backup. Can't say I notice a big difference between the two in this regard. The difference is that the i7 ramps up to the higher temperature quicker but also goes back down to 70 C faster. The fan noise is similar; at 5,000 it's really not that loud.

Subjectively, I don't think the i7 is any louder than my i5, but as is clear in this thread this could just be the luck of the draw. The most surprising thing for me is that the i7 during my typical use (Safari, Mail, Calendar, Tweetdeck, iTunes, Spotify, Pages, Dashboard) is a degree or two lower than the i5 and they idle about the same.

 

[DrGeekFR]

They both have the same data on them, about 80GB. They get up to 83 C at different points of the backup (which takes about an hour) with the fans getting to about 5,000. For neither is the heat or fan constant, going down to about 70 C during the backup. Can't say I notice a big difference between the two in this regard. The difference is that the i7 ramps up to the higher temperature quicker but also goes back down to 70 C faster. The fan noise is similar; at 5,000 it's really not that loud.

Subjectively, I don't think the i7 is any louder than my i5, but as is clear in this thread this could just be the luck of the draw. The most surprising thing for me is that the i7 during my typical use (Safari, Mail, Calendar, Tweetdeck, iTunes, Spotify, Pages, Dashboard) is a degree or two lower than the i5 and they idle about the same.

Thank you very interesting

 

[nnguyen]

just got my i7 256gb 13in mba - both samsung screen/ssd - no heat issue here

 

[sporadicMotion]

4 instances of yes > /dev/null ramps the CPU up to 96c until the fan gets to full speed. Then it drops to 90c. The thing that impressed me is the fan. At 6400 rpm, it was quietly purring away. This is so much quieter than my 2011 13" pro this replaced. It definitely gets a bit hotter than the pro, but that can be expected due to the form factor differences.

It's an i5 13" btw.

 

[spyderx]

My 13" i7 stays cool to the touch and is comfortable to use on my lap even when the CPU is up to 80 C. It also stays silent until I encode a movie or do another similar CPU intensive task. I cannot fathom the commotion about this.

Been my experience also. 13" i7 here. The only time the fan came on was when I first migrated the machine and Spotlight was re-indexing everything (which I had issues with, never used migration assistant and probably won't in the future... had to manually delete the spotlight index and recreate it to get it to complete the index). I spend most of my time in a Windows7 VM under VMware Fusion and it works as well as my i5 Macbook Pro (faster actually). Even when it starts doing some mild swapping. No fans. Minimal heat.

If you're gaming, encoding video, etc you very well might get fan noise.

 

[rbn]

For general use such as browsing the web with safari (no flash) with 5 tabs open, iTunes playing some music and mail app open, what would be considered the 'expected norm' for cpu temp for a 13" MBA i5 with 128ssd?

 

[fletch33]

bought the 11" 1.8GHz a few days ago and had the previous 2010 11" 1.4GHz before that. first day or so on the new 11" it ran about 140F on average where my 2010 ran about 125F most of the time.

now that i have had it running a couple of days the new 11" is running about 120F and the battery has been about the same as my 2010 was.

i can not see any difference in heat or fan now from my 1.4GHz 2010 and my 1.8GHz 2011 but i can sure see the speed boost YEAH

the first 48 hours i thought i was also going to be in the returning it for the i5 club but not any longer and im glad i went with the i7.

for reference i am always running iChat, Skype, Chrome (3 or 4 tabs), Mail, and Colloquy.

 

[JES]

Hi All,

Thanks to everyone who replied to my queries. Finally got my 13" MBA and I went for the i7. So far, so good. It runs a little warm if I'm pushing it (that doesn't really matter to me) and I've only heard fan noise during big installations. Otherwise, it's dead quiet.

If I have problems, I will post again. Otherwise, I'm happy.

--JES

 

[mike95]

Hi everyone,

We recently got a 13" i7 Macbook Air because of its portability. But we found out that it overheats and generates extremely loud fan noise. It is so loud that its noise exceeds my quad core workstation class laptop under heavy load. We find this unacceptable since we are not trying to do heavy 3D work or anything like that on the MBA as we do on our other laptop.
We will return our Macbook Air i7 today because of the overheating and excessive fan noise. We will get an i5 model instead and I will post my findings here so that it may help you on your decisions.

Best

Was the i5 less noisy? I have 11" i5 and was wishing to have gotten i7 upgrade given the performance boost claims for the 11". However reading your post, I now not so sure...

 

[mike95]

I've had:
2010 - 13"
2010 - 11" 1.4ghz (because 13" sounded like a tornado playing flight simulator)
2011 - 11" 1.6

I was very happy with the 2010 model 11". The fan noise was much less than the 13". I believe the 2011 models they became more comparable. With 11" i7 vs i5, I think neither fan goes above 6500 so the fan noise will be the same as far as decibels are concerned, however i7 may crank up sooner as a previous post mentioned.

One thing which has made my life super happy regards to battery life, fan noise, & temperature more than anything else is a special little Safari plugin called "Click to Flash" or the more generic version "Click to Plugin".

Click to Flash puts you in control with regards to randomly loading flash on web pages. You will see a gray box where the flash would normally play and you have to click if you want to load it. BELIEVE ME, the most basic flash animation, depending on which version of flash and how it was developed, can easily crank up the cpu! This is precisely why Steve Jobs refused to include flash on the iOS devices and additionally took off flash from default configuration not too long ago. Click to plugin is similar, but more generic and allows for more flexibility too and recommend it over the simpler one as it forces, say, HTMl5 versions of videos 's load (if available) instead of loading the flash. Additionally, you can also put sites which are exceptions to the blocked plugins.

 

[Nioxic]

I only have the i7 because that was my only option if i wanted the 256gb ssd..

i can live with the noise... its only there if im playing videos / games, and if i do ill be either having headset on, and cant hear it, or ill turn up the volume.. :b


But i do agree that the heat is annoying. its not worse than on my old windows laptop.. (it seriously has burn marks on the top side where i have my hand)

 

[mike95]

I believe the next OSX update will reduce heat and fan noise. My iMac27 was always exceedingly hot to touch on the upper left, however this has changed to a mild warm with no audible increase in fan noise. I'm not going to install it on my MacBook Air until the final version is released, however it's my impression there is better power management and indirectly this should help with battery and power on the MacBooks.