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MBP running very hot.

A

artnotwar

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 3, 2011
56
0
My GF's MBP (early 2011) has been running VERY hot lately. I know it's not normal because I have the exact same macbook. It's only happening sporadically though.
Any ideas what it could be? And how do you tell apple you want a new one if it's not running hot when you take it in to the shop?
And BTW where is the fan outlet? It almost seems like there is no fan in MBP's.

I hate sporadic problems, I once had a xbox that used to freeze up on me after playing for an hour or two. Sent it back and they said nothing was wrong with it. Obviously they are not going to sit there and play it for hours :mad:
 
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Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
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The vents are below the black strip used to tilt the display/lid.
 
artnotwar said:
My GF's MBP (early 2011) has been running VERY hot lately. I know it's not normal because I have the exact same macbook. It's only happening sporadically though.
Any ideas what it could be? And how do you tell apple you want a new one if it's not running hot when you take it in to the shop?
And BTW where is the fan outlet? It almost seems like there is no fan in MBP's.

I hate sporadic problems, I once had a xbox that used to freeze up on me after playing for an hour or two. Sent it back and they said nothing was wrong with it. Obviously they are not going to sit there and play it for hours :mad:
Click to expand...
As always with questions like this, you need to look into what's running. It doesn't just run hot for no reason and swapping it out won't solve the problem. In some rare cases it may be hardware but more often than not something's taxing the CPU and causing it to heat up. Pay attention to what's running on her MBP when it heats up.

As for what is or isn't "normal", again depends on what's running. Merely having the same MBP doesn't really mean anything in this regard. I can take 2 identical MBP's and easily have one heat up while the other does not using entirely different applications/games on the 2 machines.

artnotwar said:
And BTW where is the fan outlet? It almost seems like there is no fan in MBP's.
Click to expand...
The hinge. Where the hot air comes out.
 
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I really don't see how hers could get any hotter than mine, we both use the same programs. Our computers are near identical apart from the files (photos, music and video).
Simsaladimbamba i followed your advice, and nothing really seems to be really chewing up memory. In saying that I don't really know much about this kind of thing so i'll post a screenshot of it.



takeshi74 said:
The hinge. Where the hot air comes out.
Click to expand...

Good one smarty pants, the only reason I asked is because I can never feel or hear hot air coming out anywhere.
 
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Just downloaded iStat pro and the max temp it has been in the last 5 minutes is 67. It is hanging around the mid to high 50's though which is the same as mine. All the other temps are roughly the same as mine but the bottom of the case feels substantially hotter than mine???

Oh and I forgot to mention that twice in the last week the fan seemed to kick into overdrive. We just turned it off and let it cool down. Never heard the fan run like that before.
 
mine idles at ~40C and running light stuff (Chrome, iTunes, Outlook, Sparrow, iCal, Hamachi) it's at 44C...
 
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artnotwar said:
Oh and I forgot to mention that twice in the last week the fan seemed to kick into overdrive. We just turned it off and let it cool down. Never heard the fan run like that before.
Click to expand...

The fan idles at 2000 RPM, but if needed, it will spin up to 6000 RPM. And you don't need to turn the MBP off in order to let it cool down, at least from a technical perspective. My MBP (17", 2009 model) currently has a CPU temperature of 70° C and it is not hot, not even the bottom.
 
Yeah see that's what worries me. You say yours isn't hot to the touch on the bottom when the cpu is at 70° C, either is mine.
Hers is VERY hot to the touch even when the CPU temp is 55-67° C. Hot enough to make me think it can cause damage, and I do know laptops can get pretty hot. Even the bottom 1/4-1/3rd of her screen is hot.
My screen has a VERY slight warm spot in the middle that is small.
Something just don't add up.
 
Two things that stand out in your Activity Monitor: Flash and VLC.

It doesn't take much for Flash to start burning through CPU cycles and producing lots of heat from your Mac. As for VLC depending what your playing it can also be fairly resource heavy.
 
thermal

only one way to solve the hot issue

reapply the thermal paste

Ive don't it to my mbp (using Arctic silver 5), now the aver temp down by 10C
 
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