MacBook Pro temperature range and fans

[brbwarriors]

What temps are you guys getting with your MacBook Pro. I'm using istats currently and my cpu seems to hover around 40 degrees when doing absolutely nothing. Usually stays around 40-50 when browsing, though sometimes can browse to 60 when browsing certain sites that use a lot of cpu.

What's weird is The fan never comes on and I don't see how that is possible for the cpu to stay cool with no fan coming on? I can start the fan manually in istats but it's just weird I guess coming from a Asus gaming laptop where the fan is usually running a little bit most of the time. This MacBook the fan is never on...which is awesome of course because browsing and doing simple tasks with no noise is nice.

The fan will automatically come on I gather when I start editing videos. But you would think the fan would have to run a little bit for the laptop to keep cool and stay in the 40s. After removing the heat sink, etc. I don't see how the cpu would cool passively.

I recently changed from the stock thermal paste to graphite thermal pads. My idle temps seem to improve but temps seem the same overall. What's nice I guess is I'll never have to worry about the paste drying out.

 

[Thysanoptera]

The fans are always on, at 2k rpms, not audible at this speed, but they're on. We're talking about 2018/2019 right? Apple prioritizes noise over CPU temps, so the fans are lagging. But still, you should see low 30C with fans at idle and ambient in low 20C. If you have iStatMenus you should see both fans at 2000 rpms when idle.

I'm really curious about those graphite pads, my intuition tells me they're useless in laptops due to small force between the heatplate and CPU, and because of flexible chassis, but if you were successful with it I'd like to hear more about it. What is the spread between CPU cores temps? Do you remember how that was with stock paste? I mean it is entirely possible that you made matters worse with those pads, if you never had Macbook before - it does spotlight indexing when you first start it up, that lasts hours, loads the CPU and creates the impression that the thermal compound is bad.

 

[brbwarriors]

No I have a 2015 Pro. I see like low 30s celsius sometimes when I come back to the laptop from idle but it will shoot up to the 40s right away once I do stuff. My laptop likes the 40s for browsing, youtube, etc.



Well I doubt I made it worse as I used IC Graphite thermal pads in my Asus gaming laptop on both the GTX1070 cpu and i7 7700hq and it actually performed better than my go to arctic cooling MX4 paste where the cpu would actually increase the clock speed on it's own with the thermal pads. With MX4 I was running like 3.4ghz, with the graphite pads I saw 3.6. I found that the Graphite thermal pads seemed to work well in the gaming laptop for hours of gaming sessions on the gpu and cpu. Absolutely no issues and wouldn't hesitate to use it in any laptop.

In comparison to the stock thermal paste that was removed it actually seems about the same for browsing the internet and youtube thus far...usually staying in the 40s or low 50s.

And on the 2015 15.4 inch model(with no graphics card) the heat sink seems pretty solid, simple, and flat since it's only job is to cool the two chips of the cpu. Not much can go wrong since I don't have to worry about messing with vram thermal pads and pads for the vrms on the Asus. I'm not sure about other models but on the A1398 2015 model, it is working fine. I will test out some final cut pro however and see how it performs.

 

[Thysanoptera]

I found that the Graphite thermal pads seemed to work well in the gaming laptop for hours of gaming sessions on the gpu and cpu. Absolutely no issues and wouldn't hesitate to use it in any laptop.

Good to know, thanks! But I still would be most interested in how the individual core temperatures look like when the CPU is pushed to the max. I'd really appreciate if you could make a IStat screenshot while running Cinebench 20 or something else that loads the CPU with those graphite pads in place.