Macbook pro me665 15'' gaming/heat question

[Marts Branks]

I just bought my rMBP (early 2013) 16gb ram, 2.7 Ghz and while im playing empire total war, computer fans go to 5500 rpm and gpu heats up to 85c (everything else is about 50-65c)
Why is it so if my cpu usage is about 15% and there are 12 Gb of memory free and hdd is also almost empty?
Then what will happen when like 90% of cpu is in use?
Is this normal?

I got all the stats from istat pro.

Thank you

 

[B...]

Games are taxing on the GPU so it heats up. Not so much on the CPU. Those are normal temps.

 

[mattshawman]

I was going to post something similar but seems like someone already asked it. I've got a standard macbook pro purchased early this year, 2.5 ghz and 16gb RAM

I have the same problem only when playing Civ V and it heats up loads! Would that kind of heating cause any damage to my macbook?

 

[thundersteele]

CPU % are rather meaningless these days, with multi-core machines, hyperthreading and turbo-boost.

Your CPU has 4 cores, and each can handle two threads simultaneously - if a process only utilizes one core, it can at most task 12.5% of the CPU. However in that case turbo-boost will jump in and crank up that single core to 3.7 GHz, so effectively the CPU is still under 100% load, and produces a lot of heat.

If you look at Activity Monitor, it will sometimes show multiple applications taking 100% each, while parallelized applications can go up to 800%.

CPU % just doesn't make too much sense when there are multiple cores that can run at different speeds or be idle.


Edit: And please don't start worrying about the heat. All CPUs have built in protection that will make them shut down if the temperature goes above their limits.

 

[leman]

Then what will happen when like 90% of cpu is in use?

Well, basically nothing very different from what is happening now

Is this normal?

Yes.

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Would that kind of heating cause any damage to my macbook?

Any kind of use damages your macbook Anyway, you have your warranty, if the machine should die, it was probably defective in the first place. Excessive heat can and will shorten the life of electronic components, but its a very complicated topic to give a quick answer. As a rule of thumb: your laptop is more likely to live longer if you use it less - but on average, it should outlive its useful time (around 3 years).

 

[mattshawman]

Thanks for your help!