Macbook pro early 2011 Heat and Fan issue

[msongsfs]

Hello all. This is my first time signing up for Macrumors so just bear with me.

My mac has been really hot and noisy these days. When playing games (minecraft, League of legends), I always have this awful fan noise running at 6200Rpm. My friends all have the same mac but they don't even make a sound when they play games. During class, only my computer is loud and it embarrasses me. I never had a overheat shutdown before though. Why am I targeted with this problem?

I've tried almost everything I could find. Some of them are listed here:
SMC reset
PRAM reset
Cleaning dust inside
Getting fan control apps
quitting intense apps when playing
activity monitor
Freeing up space (freed up almost 100 gb)
Virus scan (2 viruses, deleted them (clamxav))

Don't want to give my mac to them as I heard they do nothing to help.

I would very much appreciate it if you could reply anything that would help me. Please don't be like, "theres nothing you can do about it. Deal with it," because I kinda already know that.

Thank you!

Computer specs:

MacBook Pro
13-inch, Early 2011
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB
Software OS X 10.9.2 (13C64)
320GB sata disk

I might be getting a ram upgrade from 4gb to 8gb. Is it worth it?

 

[Kariya]

Definitely do the RAM upgrade. You might also need to re-apply your thermal paste.

 

[yjchua95]

Hello all. This is my first time signing up for Macrumors so just bear with me.

My mac has been really hot and noisy these days. When playing games (minecraft, League of legends), I always have this awful fan noise running at 6200Rpm. My friends all have the same mac but they don't even make a sound when they play games. During class, only my computer is loud and it embarrasses me. I never had a overheat shutdown before though. Why am I targeted with this problem?

I've tried almost everything I could find. Some of them are listed here:
SMC reset
PRAM reset
Cleaning dust inside
Getting fan control apps
quitting intense apps when playing
activity monitor
Freeing up space (freed up almost 100 gb)
Virus scan (2 viruses, deleted them (clamxav))

Don't want to give my mac to them as I heard they do nothing to help.

I would very much appreciate it if you could reply anything that would help me. Please don't be like, "theres nothing you can do about it. Deal with it," because I kinda already know that.

Thank you!

Computer specs:

MacBook Pro
13-inch, Early 2011
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB
Software OS X 10.9.2 (13C64)
320GB sata disk

I might be getting a ram upgrade from 4gb to 8gb. Is it worth it?

RAM upgrade + SSD. With an SSD your Mac will boot up in 11 seconds and also have instant app launching.

An SSD is the best performance upgrade you can give to it.

----------

Definitely do the RAM upgrade. You might also need to re-apply your thermal paste.

There's no dGPU in the 13" 2011 MBPs, so Radeongate won't hit it and hence, reapplying the thermal paste isn't necessary.

 

[msongsfs]

Thank you all for your cooperation!

Sorry that I don't know how to reply to text but, I know that ssd and ram are really good but I don't really want to waste my money. I have 2 questions: if I could choose either ssd or ram, what should I pick? My second question is that will either upgrade actually help my fan issue? I heard that ram makes things go hotter and ssd just improves speed...

 

[niteflyr]

The real question here, is if your computer is hot or not. Maybe a bad temp sensor is ramping the fan up to high. If it is indeed hot, there could be some other issues. iStat menus app will monitor temps.

Did activity monitor show high CPU usage? If so what process. Have you tried re-installing OSX?

 

[zwodubber]

Thank you all for your cooperation!

Sorry that I don't know how to reply to text but, I know that ssd and ram are really good but I don't really want to waste my money. I have 2 questions: if I could choose either ssd or ram, what should I pick? My second question is that will either upgrade actually help my fan issue? I heard that ram makes things go hotter and ssd just improves speed...

I have an early 2011 MBP 13" also.

I used OWC's 8GB RAM and the OWC Mercury Electra 6G 480GB SSD and highly recommend both. The RAM has been in over 2 years and the SSD is only about 3 months old.


Boot time is about 11 seconds

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_6G/

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple_MacBook_MacBook_Pro/Upgrade/DDR3_1333MHz_SDRAM

 

[thundersteele]

While you might benefit from a RAM and SSD upgrade, it will most likely not help with the temperature/fan issue.

Now, temperature and fan noise is usually strongly correlated with load on the system. You seem to be aware of that, based on the steps you already tried.

Lets start with the first issue, gaming: It is normal for a system to get hot (& loud) when gaming, since it puts a lot of load on the CPU. One of the few ways to limit the load is to set a frame rate limit in the game, and lower the settings. So I'm mostly surprised that your friends' laptops stay silent - are you sure they are actually playing the same games on exactly the same Macs? Are they using any frame rate limiters?

The next issue is noise when not gaming. Here really the question is to find out how and why you put load on the system? Special software? Videos? Activity Monitor should help with this. If you can not see any process that uses 10-20% or more CPU, and your fans still come up, maybe something is broken.

 

[msongsfs]

While you might benefit from a RAM and SSD upgrade, it will most likely not help with the temperature/fan issue.

Now, temperature and fan noise is usually strongly correlated with load on the system. You seem to be aware of that, based on the steps you already tried.

Lets start with the first issue, gaming: It is normal for a system to get hot (& loud) when gaming, since it puts a lot of load on the CPU. One of the few ways to limit the load is to set a frame rate limit in the game, and lower the settings. So I'm mostly surprised that your friends' laptops stay silent - are you sure they are actually playing the same games on exactly the same Macs? Are they using any frame rate limiters?

The next issue is noise when not gaming. Here really the question is to find out how and why you put load on the system? Special software? Videos? Activity Monitor should help with this. If you can not see any process that uses 10-20% or more CPU, and your fans still come up, maybe something is broken.

ok thanks everyone for posting ideas! ,

As I said before? Which one should I get? Ram or SSD? My parents won't allow both of them. I have nothing in my activity monitor that takes up a lot of space except for the game. With nothing open, my average temperature is about 50 Celsius and I make my game settings really low.

Another question. How does my friend's computer not make any sound? We usually compare with eachother and when we play a flash game like "get on top", mine is really laggy and heats up, and my friends is fast and doesn't make a sound. We have the exact same computer. 4 gb of ram, 320 hdd disk etc.

 

[simonsi]

...when we play a flash game like "get on top", mine is really laggy and heats up, and my friends is fast and doesn't make a sound. We have the exact same computer. 4 gb of ram, 320 hdd disk etc.

Check the version of flash you are using.

Your computer may be running something your friends isn't. Bring up activity monitor, CPU view and sort by CPU usage to see what is running.

 

[msongsfs]

Check the version of flash you are using.

Your computer may be running something your friends isn't. Bring up activity monitor, CPU view and sort by CPU usage to see what is running.

Hello. Right now, my flash is at its latest update. Here is a screenshot of my activity monitor right before it started to heat up and run the fans again. Is it normal to have about 200 processes running in activity monitor? I think there is something suspicious over there...

 

[simonsi]

Chrome eats CPU, if not using it close it down. And how many Google Chrome Helpers do you need

I just use Safari wherever possible, Firefox when Safari won't cut it, I never use Chrome.

 

[msongsfs]

Hello. Right now, my flash is at its latest update. Here is a screenshot of my activity monitor right before it started to heat up and run the fans again. Is it normal to have about 200 processes running in activity monitor? I think there is something suspicious over there...

whoops sry. wrong pic. Here it is:

I just don't understand how the launcher and client take up about 40-80% of my CPU. it doesn't make sense