MBP 2011 w/ Mavericks Heat

[undesign]

I don't think you need to take it apart again by the look of that lot. Marvellous

----------



I reckon your MBP is going to be fine for a while yet.

Punishing tasks are not for a mini, they get just as hot, my video customers have to sit them on cooling pads like the MBP. If you have room for one and you have a lot of hard transcoding work to do I would seriously consider getting a used 4/5,1 Mac Pro. There will be a lot of them on the market once the new black can is available and the prices will drop. My old 2008 3,1 is pretty outdated by Mac Pro standards and much slower than the newer models but the twin 3.2 quad core Xeons and 32gb ram takes more punishment than I can throw at it with aplomb. I should have bought one years ago and will be upgrading it to probably a 5,1 with twin hex core chips when I get one cheap enough transferring all the upgrades and drives into the newer model. It's already fast enough for me as it is!

I paid $640 USD equivalent for my tower, $540 in reality cos I sold the raid card on eBay!

I could always abuse my work laptop! LOL, I dont really care what happens as my company gave it to me (but not to own).

 

[Gav Mack]

I could always abuse my work laptop! LOL, I dont really care what happens as my company gave it to me (but not to own).

Cane the crap out of that then - sorted

If it's you're own a different story - I reckon you'd enjoy joining the silver cheesegrater face club. For those who like to take their machines apart and upgrade them it's simply marvellous

 

[undesign]

Cane the crap out of that then - sorted

If it's you're own a different story - I reckon you'd enjoy joining the silver cheesegrater face club. For those who like to take their machines apart and upgrade them it's simply marvellous

I actually used to have a Mac Pro 1,1 and before that a Power Mac MDD. Both we're fantastic in their time. But I went back to school a couple years ago for web design and development and sold the Mac Pro and got the 2011 MBP. Coincidentally it turned out to be twice as fast except for the GPU. I did tinker with the Mac Pro though... upgraded RAM, swapped hard drives, went through 4 different video cards, switched fan to a large heatsink on the ATI 3870, ran it in crossfire, had two GT 7300's in SLI, etc.

 

[Gav Mack]

I actually used to have a Mac Pro 1,1 and before that a Power Mac MDD. Both we're fantastic in their time. But I went back to school a couple years ago for web design and development and sold the Mac Pro and got the 2011 MBP. Coincidentally it turned out to be twice as fast except for the GPU. I did tinker with the Mac Pro though... upgraded RAM, swapped hard drives, went through 4 different video cards, switched fan to a large heatsink on the ATI 3870, ran it in crossfire, had two GT 7300's in SLI, etc.

My 2008 is about comparable to your MBP maybe slightly quicker - a 4,1 upgraded to twin hex on the other hand is over twice as fast and the GPU options with an additional PSU go up to a pair of titans, way over what I'm happy with the 680. Probably looking at about $1000-1200 bucks for a tower now I expect that to fall next year.

For a lot of handbrake work I know what I would prefer to use if it was my own Mac doing it!

 

[undesign]

My 2008 is about comparable to your MBP maybe slightly quicker - a 4,1 upgraded to twin hex on the other hand is over twice as fast and the GPU options with an additional PSU go up to a pair of titans, way over what I'm happy with the 680. Probably looking at about $1000-1200 bucks for a tower now I expect that to fall next year.

For a lot of handbrake work I know what I would prefer to use if it was my own Mac doing it!

For the Handbrake stuff, a Mac Mini would suffice. I'm in no rush to get files quickly compressed. I think it would be fine. I'd actually prefer it; small size, significantly cheaper and a great item for an HTPC.

 

[Gav Mack]

For the Handbrake stuff, a Mac Mini would suffice. I'm in no rush to get files quickly compressed. I think it would be fine. I'd actually prefer it; small size, significantly cheaper and a great item for an HTPC.

As long as you have it running low priority they don't rev up too much, pushing hard though it's a different story. I have a quad core micro server doing mine automatically via cli, drop a file in one folder and that gets transcoded and placed in another.

HTPC mini's I've done quite a few, with dual drive kits with SSD boot roughly half run Plex and the other bootcamp with Win 7 media center. The latter has plug ins such as media control and my movies which make a superb all round combination, plays everything. Sadly the Mac mini HTPC was not for me and went PC cos I have 6tb storage in one box

 

[undesign]

As long as you have it running low priority they don't rev up too much, pushing hard though it's a different story. I have a quad core micro server doing mine automatically via cli, drop a file in one folder and that gets transcoded and placed in another.

HTPC mini's I've done quite a few, with dual drive kits with SSD boot roughly half run Plex and the other bootcamp with Win 7 media center. The latter has plug ins such as media control and my movies which make a superb all round combination, plays everything. Sadly the Mac mini HTPC was not for me and went PC cos I have 6tb storage in one box

I suppose I could always limit the number of cores to a single one on the Mac Mini through Handbrake to keep the heat down as suggested by Swampus (fantastic suggestion too!).

 

[Swampus]

I actually used to have a Mac Pro 1,1 and before that a Power Mac MDD. Both we're fantastic in their time...

For the analog to digital work that you mentioned earlier, I almost exclusively still use my PowerPC G4 MDD for that! It has an Elgato video input adapter and an Elgato H.264 hardware encoder. It's also my TV and DVR (you guessed it, Elgato EyeTV). It's pretty much an Elgato machine with a bunch of internal drive space. Anything that gets transcoded to standard definition for our handheld devices still gets done on this machine. It's convenient since the G4 has become home to our video library. Eleven years and still going strong.

I'm in no rush to get files quickly compressed.

I also have the HD version of the Elgato dongle that I use with my MBP on occasion. It's slower than the i7 processor, of course, but I find it handy when I have other CPU intensive work to do. It will run in the background and not use many CPU cycles, so it leaves plenty of CPU headroom for doing other stuff. One could actually encode two videos at the same time this way (the dongle takes twice as long, so you'd really be doing three in the time that it would normally take to do two). And it uses a lot less electricity so it makes more sense than booting up the Mac Pro when I'm not doing any actual editing. It might be worth a thought if time isn't really an issue for these encodes.

If you decide to keep your 2011 MBP, I'd try not to worry about it, though. You've already done the best job that anyone can hope for in reducing temperatures. I'd just run it exactly the way I wanted to run it and hope for the best. If it fails, get it repaired. In this case, getting a new GPU or reball done by a professional shop with high-end equipment would probably be better than playing the logic board lottery. It'll cost you $250 to $300.

 

[Gav Mack]

I suppose I could always limit the number of cores to a single one on the Mac Mini through Handbrake to keep the heat down as suggested by Swampus (fantastic suggestion too!).

Can do single core but temps can get high running just one - use the low priority switch too.

 

[undesign]

Can do single core but temps can get high running just one - use the low priority switch too.

How do I do a low priority switch? I cant find anything in Handbrakes preferences...

 

[Swampus]

How do I do a low priority switch? I cant find anything in Handbrakes preferences...

I think they mean to change the PID to a higher number (to give a lower priority). I don't know how well this works with HandBrake. No matter how much it is willing to yield to other processes, it's still going to use 100% of whatever is left over when doing an HD encode.

Another thing you can do, though, is try this:
http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html

Specifically, here is what you would do...

1) Download (to your desktop if you want to follow the rest of these instructions to the letter).

2) Unzip if your browser didn't already do it for you.

3) Make executable--Open terminal and type:
chmod +x desktop/cputhrottle

(Obviously, steps one through three are only required the first time.)

4) Launch Handbrake.

5) Open Activity Monitor to see what PID Handbrake is using this time.

6) Go back to terminal and type:
sudo desktop/cputhrottle XXXX 300

(Replace XXXX with HandBrake's PID. I'm suggesting 300% just because it's something that works well for me when I want to run HandBrake in the distant background and still have plenty of CPU power left over for other things. Experiment to see what meets your needs. Keep in mind that 800% is how the system thinks of the maximum potential of an eight threaded CPU.)

Even when you give HandBrake the lowest priority it still creates lag and makes things feel sluggish if you're doing anything other than web browsing. To me, it's well worth a few keystrokes to get things exactly the way you want. For me, setting HandBrake to use 300% leaves enough CPU headroom to make Photoshop feel perfectly normal. You might like doing it this way too.