iMac 2019 runs occasionally at 100°C? [Merged]

[wardie]

The 2017 iMac has been out there for two years with outrageous temps and there haven't been widespread failures. Sporadic ones, but not widespread.

Are there any credible sources for the failure rates and causes? I’m guessing Apple don’t publish such info on returns but are there 3rd party sources?

 

[EugW]

Or, instead of jury rigging some sort of concoction to keep a 95W CPU cool with a cooling system that was designed for 65W CPUs you could instead just get an iMac with a 65W CPU and not worry about temperatures and fan noise at all. I dare to say that most users are not going to notice the difference between the 65W i5-8500 or i5-8600 and the 95W i5-9600K. Yes, it might be a split second slower here and there but nothing to write home about. In return, it should remain MUCH cooler and quieter. Case in point: my 2017 base model (3.4 GHz i5) never exceeds 70°C under full load, and I have yet to witness the fan rev up above its 1,200 rpm base line.

The i5-9900K is a different story since it has two additional cores. Plus it is also the only one available with the optional Vega 48 GPU. Why? Because Apple said so.

I did the same. I had the 2017 i7-7700K and returned it because of fan noise. I bought the 3.5 GHz i5-7600 and have lived happily ever after with it.

However, the 2019 iMacs have much hotter chips. Even the i5 chips run significantly hotter, since they’re now 6-core, so their behaviour won’t be quite the same as our 2017 i5 iMacs.

BTW, with video renders I can get my i5-7600 to hit 100C but it takes almost 10 mins to get there. With the 7700K it would hit 100C very quickly, with the fan at max in 30 seconds.

 

[spiderpumpkin]

Does the i5 9600K run cooler on average than the i9 9900k?

 

[Peter S.]

Just to bring this tread alive again! My iMac late 2014 i5, shuts down when the temp. reaches 108° (GPU Diode). The fan is sometime able to spin at 3300 rpm, but at the moment I can't go higher than 2700 rpm, which isn't enough for me to play WoW. I've done a PRAM reset, but still the speed won't go past 2700.

 

[dimme]

My question was specifically about the Radeon Pro Vega 48, which regularly hits temps of 95-99 degrees Centigrade on my machine even when running fairly old games.

I was wondering how you machine and GPU temps have been. I game once and a while and my GPU will hit 95C. So far there have been no issues here.

 

[Andy5Kimac]

Delid the CPU. Replace the stock intel TIM should fix the overheating issue. The stock intel TIM is garbage. I delidded my i7 7700k in my 2017 5k iMac and replaced the stock TIM with thermal Grizzly Conductonaut. I also used Arctic MX-4 on the IHS to Heat sink and on my GPU and VRAM's. Under Terminal CPU burn stress test and Cinebench r23 I still hit 90's but low 90's. I have not seen it get close to 100. Then while rendering a 8 min 4k video in FCPx it hits 75-80 through out the whole 9 min render. My GPU hits 71-75. I have not seen it pass that yet. Next time I do maintenance on my iMac I will try out the copper IHS. Supposedly it drops another 3-5 degrees.

 

[Andy5Kimac]

There's no way to know. The 2017 iMac has been out there for two years with outrageous temps and there haven't been widespread failures. Sporadic ones, but not widespread.

There have been reports of dust getting caught in the lower corners of the screens, and I've seen a few screen failures, but not many. It may be three years or more before you see issues.

As for the question is it normal for your imac. Yes it is. Exchanging it for a new one won't get you better operating temperatures. It's just the state of iMacs now.

Heat DOES cause issues. Is it guaranteed it will in the 2017 and 2019 iMacs...nope. But PC makers don't recommend running CPU's higher that 70 to 80 for long periods of time.

Also there are a ton of super low score 2017 i7 7700k iMac Geekbench 5 scores. I seen as low as 770 SC and 2300 MC... I've seen one with 64gb of RAM running 900 SC and 3400 MC score..Much worse then my previous i5 7600k iMac scores. Definitely not normal running 100C all the time and unhealthy for the computer resulting in failures...