My 2011 mac mini cpu is running at 165F to 200F wuth the exhaust fan running at 2300. Is this a normal temperature that they run at. I did clean the fan and heat sink. The mac mini feels warm to the touch and the air coming out of the back is very warm. I was just wondering thank you.
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Resolved just a temp question
- Thread starter gwb21471
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Normal temps when the CPU is busy working.
You can look in your Activity Monitor, in CPU tab, to see what processes are active at the moment.
(the Activity Monitor is in the /Applications/Utilities folder)
You said you cleaned the heat sink. Did you then replace the heat sink compound with fresh?
You can look in your Activity Monitor, in CPU tab, to see what processes are active at the moment.
(the Activity Monitor is in the /Applications/Utilities folder)
You said you cleaned the heat sink. Did you then replace the heat sink compound with fresh?
I just blew out the dust out of the heat sink and clean the fan blades off. I didn't put any new pasta on it. I know cpu core 1,3,4 stay between 181F to 198F and cpu core 2 runs between 188F to 205F. I didn't take the heat sink off.
The "paste" is 13 years old, and likely is much less effective now.
Re-paste would be a good way to treat your mini, and would likely bring your CPU temps down to a better range.
But, you should also look at your Activity Monitor. A new macOS install would probably take some time finishing the database that is created on a newly installed system, and can certainly keep temps up for a few hours of first use. You can verify that by checking in the Activity Monitor.
If this is actually a Mac mini server model (model identifier Macmini5,3), are the hard drives swapped out for SSDs?
Re-paste would be a good way to treat your mini, and would likely bring your CPU temps down to a better range.
But, you should also look at your Activity Monitor. A new macOS install would probably take some time finishing the database that is created on a newly installed system, and can certainly keep temps up for a few hours of first use. You can verify that by checking in the Activity Monitor.
If this is actually a Mac mini server model (model identifier Macmini5,3), are the hard drives swapped out for SSDs?
Yes it is the server model from mid 2011 and I all ready installed two new ssd hard drives and got Mac OS 10.12 on it. I going to put new paste on it tomorrow when I get my day going. Thanks for the help.
Yes the paste was not really there any more. It was dried up and the center of the cpu didn’t have any paste left. I hook it up and my cpu is running at 95F to 122F underload. Thank you again.
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Well update. It was working great and temperature went no higher than 135F but for some reason it’s going up to 165F and it will restart and after booting done I get a report saying that cpu core 2 is causing kernel panicking. But core 1,3,4 seem to be working fine. I change the paste and after that it was working great. All the cores went no higher then 135F with a heavy load and at idle it went to 115F. So I am lost. It was on for two hours before the temperature started to go up. I left it off for about hour and turned it back on. With 30 to 50 seconds the cpu temperature it up to 145F to 165F. It will stay within that range for about 5 minutes and the Mac mini will restart with a error after it starts back up. In my mind either the cpu bad or the paste I have is to cheap. I hope it ain’t a bad cpu.
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Nope I look at it and the only thing that was taking lot of activity was the activity monitor that was at 45%. So I don’t know. All I do know is the paste I used was oily and on the side it said that being oily is normal and the oil won’t hurt the cpu and the oil will dry up after a while.
Well took the bottom cover off. The paste melted out from under the heat sink. Guess that is what I get for buying thermo paste off of Amazon that is cheap.
I did some test. If I open google chrome my cpu temperature goes up to 155F from 117F at idle but if I open iTunes it stays around 125F. Now if I open safari it ups up to 150F then goes down to 140F that’s with me opening up YouTube. I got an error message telling me safari had to restart do to quitting unexpectedly then the temperature jump up to 170F and after I closed safari the temperature drop to 115F. So I am wondering if the heat sink could be bad. If you could have a bad heat sink. I watching it right now and at idle the temperature stays between 107F to 117F. So I don’t know. May let it stays on all night on the table and see what happens.
my 2014 mini at idle in my colder garage right now is running around 88F, 1800 rpm fan speed, its around 50F ambient right now. its a cold night here but can peak around 180F very under heavy load when it was inside as my media server. I rebuilt it using Arctic 5 thermal paste on the CPU and an NVMe drive with a copper heat sink last summer. it's been a workhorse since then.