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Macbook Fan is always running...could use some help please.

N

nickpaigo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 20, 2009
6
0
Hi All,
Slight problem. My macbook is from late 2006, it was the midlevel model, 2GHZ Intel Core Duo. I have 2 Gigs of non-apple ram. My fan is kicking on all of the time. This has always been problematic but seems to be a lot worse now. It kicks on whenever I slightly push the machine using photoshop, whenever I go online to a site w/ flash anything on it, and whenever I do simple things like play Snood?? Weird right? I know that these have always been ovens but something seems wrong. I've never had a mac laptop act this way before except once when a motherboard went bad. The fan sounds like a 747 during takeoff. I ran a HW test to see if anything was weird and it all came out fine, even the RAM. Has anyone else out there run into this? Do you know if I need to swap out my 2 gigs for the original apple ram to bring it into a store? Thanks in advance
 
I have the same MB, and it does the same thing. Flash is to blame most of the time.
 
nickpaigo said:
Hi All,
Slight problem. My macbook is from late 2006, it was the midlevel model, 2GHZ Intel Core Duo. I have 2 Gigs of non-apple ram. My fan is kicking on all of the time. This has always been problematic but seems to be a lot worse now. It kicks on whenever I slightly push the machine using photoshop, whenever I go online to a site w/ flash anything on it, and whenever I do simple things like play Snood?? Weird right? I know that these have always been ovens but something seems wrong. I've never had a mac laptop act this way before except once when a motherboard went bad. The fan sounds like a 747 during takeoff. I ran a HW test to see if anything was weird and it all came out fine, even the RAM. Has anyone else out there run into this? Do you know if I need to swap out my 2 gigs for the original apple ram to bring it into a store? Thanks in advance
Click to expand...
That sounds perfectly normal to me.
 
Normal??? really???? Has anyone of you brought it into Apple to get it checked? I never experienced any of these kind of problems with any of my ibooks. And this machine is supposed to be more sophisticated. Its a sad day when you cant expect your Mac to do simple tasks without the fear of overheating
 
It's not going to overheat. Flash is notoriously bad on OS X. Adobe needs to get their stuff together.
 
nickpaigo said:
Normal??? really???? Has anyone of you brought it into Apple to get it checked? I never experienced any of these kind of problems with any of my ibooks. And this machine is supposed to be more sophisticated. Its a sad day when you cant expect your Mac to do simple tasks without the fear of overheating
Click to expand...
Laptops are generally hot computers, especially Apple's.

I ran my MacBook at 80° C for nearly two weeks with no complaints.

nickpaigo said:
Well what about simple photoshop stuff, or burning a CD or opening iPhoto, or snood. Flash is not to blame for all of that. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but its not only flash, it seems like everything.
Click to expand...
Run Activity Monitor while you do this to monitor CPU usage. Optical drives are loud while in use. I'd give resetting your SMC a try though.
 
Well what about simple photoshop stuff, or burning a CD or opening iPhoto, or snood. Flash is not to blame for all of that. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but its not only flash, it seems like everything.
 
nickpaigo said:
Well what about simple photoshop stuff, or burning a CD or opening iPhoto, or snood. Flash is not to blame for all of that. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but its not only flash, it seems like everything.
Click to expand...

Photoshop is a resource hog, even doing simple things like dragging the mouse around. Adobe needs to get their stuff together.

How many photos do you have in iPhoto?

While burning a CD, the disc spinning sounds a lot like the fan, but yes, that is an intensive operation as well.
 
Most of the time, this happens because a normally idle process is maxing out your CPU. Your fan runs high to keep the CPU cooled down. Run activity monitor and look for anything that is using up large amounts of your processor.
 
nickpaigo said:
Well what about simple photoshop stuff, or burning a CD or opening iPhoto, or snood. Flash is not to blame for all of that. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but its not only flash, it seems like everything.
Click to expand...

Photoshop is also Adobe. As another member said, Adobe really needs to get its act together for the Mac. My 2.4 BlackBook usually idles around 100ºF but if I open Photoshop and then leave it doing nothing in particular it'll jump to 130-140ºF and the fans'll kick in to cool it back down.

Burning a CD isn't especially processor intensive but the act of running a motor at constant speed whilst burning it with a laser creates a vast amount of heat. DVDs are even worse, I can't keep the MacBook on my knees if I'm burning an iDVD project.

iPhoto, like Finder (initially) and iTunes, indexes all of its contents every time it starts. If you have a large number of photos (or indeed tracks in iTunes) it would not be unusual for it to both take some time and during that time cause the processor to warm up. This is normal behaviour.

As for Snood, well it uses your graphics processor. The Intel Integrated Graphics processor (thank you very much Apple). Those things heat up faster than a toaster on steroids no matter what you do and so again will need the heat dispersing.

MacBook fans aren't especially quiet once they're going full tilt but at the same time I invite you to go and listen to the cooling vent of my Iridium Starbook and then come back and complain. Man, that thing sounds like a Harrier Jet through a megaphone.
 
Wait yours idles at 100F??! Mine idles at like 127, if I use photoshop it jumps way higher to like high 60C (so like 154F). I have a black Macbook with 2 gigs of RAm, and 2.4 ghz.
 
Chaser7 said:
Wait yours idles at 100F??! Mine idles at like 127, if I use photoshop it jumps way higher to like high 60C (so like 154F). I have a black Macbook with 2 gigs of RAm, and 2.4 ghz.
Click to expand...

Heh heh aye but I'm from Kielder. When your average room temperature is 50º it usually helps computer equipment stay cool. Sounds like you have the same machine as me, though I have twice as much RAM, which may also be a factor.
 
looking for help

I just headed over here looking for some help.

I use smafanctrol to keep my fans at 2K, or 2.5k for normal use, then I ramp it up to 3K or 4K for high speed downloading ore really intense activities.

That said, today something odd happened. Yes, I was streaming some flash, but I had the smcfancontrol SET to 2.5K, and yet the fans were ramping up to 4.5K, WAY above normal speeds. The temperature DIDN'T really go up, it went to like 155 F, but that isn't as high as I see normally, so it doesn't just ramp up the fans when it goes up normally.

The CPU usage with FF was indeed 120%, so a LOT of course, but is that what would make the fans ramp even though I had them SET to 2.5K?
 
Flash makes the fans go nuts, regardless of the temps ... the machine is attempting to keep the temps low.
 
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