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My Mac Pro is a fricken SPACE HEATER!

P

pprior

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 1, 2007
1,448
9
I cannot believe how much heat my mac Pro puts out. My home office (about 12 x 12 foot room) right now is 82 degrees with the door open when the rest of the house is about 75.

It wasn't as bad when I got it, but after upgrading memory it's gotten horrible. I have it under my desk and it literally feels like a space heater.

It really got bad after I added 2 x 2gb chips - have a total of 8GB of ram at this point. Activity monitor shows basically no CPU (<1%).

I wish there was a way to shut the ram OFF when not needed to save the heat. I'm scared to see what it's done to my electric bill as well. I thought Al Gore was on the board at apple?

Anyone else have this experience? If you only have base ram please don't bother to comment as I didn't notice this problem until I put larger amounts in.
 
Get a Kill-A-Watt and see if the memory really increases the power draw.

I think it's about 20Watts a DIMM which shouldn't make the room that hot.

Tracer
 
It's much more energy efficient than a Power Mac G5. Do you have an LCD display. That will also put off heat. My 30" ACD does.
 
Tracer said:
I think it's about 20Watts a DIMM which shouldn't make the room that hot.
Click to expand...

It likely will with a small enclosed room like that, and if he has an LCD as well. Having the door open doesn't make much difference.
 
LCD puts out less heat than a large CRT (trust me on that, I run both).

Think of what you'll save on heat come winter!

BTW, the dual G4s are probably the hottest running Macs ever. Mine (a Sawtooth with a dual upgrade) is literally my space heater in winter...
 
I have a PPC G5 quad with 6.5 gigs of ram....I honestly haven't noticed an issue with heat....I have her hooked up to dual 19in LCD's


BUT, my G5 is sitting next to my old skool PC (5 IDE HDD's and 5 SCSSI HDD's, 1 gig ram, dual 2.4 Xeons, dual 19in CRT's) and my PC is a way good space heater....I've almost warmed my hot chocolate by setting it on my PC's case....


When I just run the G5 I see almost not change in temp in the room....and I edit in small, closed room.
 
I was surprised that my 21" Trinitron Dell monitor could not be pushed beyond 117W at max resolution, refresh and a white page. I think CRT's have gotten a bad rap when it comes to power consumption and heat. Yes its bad but its maybe no more than double that of a similar sized LCD. I think people think that an LCD takes like 10W and a CRT takes 300W or something but its not that horribly different :)

http://powerthings.com/pics/crtpower.jpg



disconap said:
LCD puts out less heat than a large CRT (trust me on that, I run both).

Think of what you'll save on heat come winter!

BTW, the dual G4s are probably the hottest running Macs ever. Mine (a Sawtooth with a dual upgrade) is literally my space heater in winter...
Click to expand...
 
My previous dual core (Smithfield) Dell steamer trunks put out air up to about 90 degrees, and I had two of them with LCDs. My Mac Pro (8 GB RAM) is usually around 80 degrees. Between its better engineering and adding a larger a/c register in this room, my heat issue has pretty much gone away. My ham radios now are a bigger source of heat than my computers.

If it is really an issue for you, pick up a portable a/c and run it when you need it.
 
Some days i find the monitor puts out a hell of a lot of heat, compared to the mac pro, ok in winter, not so good in summer, but i find leaving the window open creates a nice air flow through my office but having the monitor against a wall or very close doesn't really let it breath so you notice the heat a lot more :) a small fan helps with air flow.
 
I solve the problem of heat by placing my Mac and 23" right next to the window where the AC is blasting. It helps :) and in winter, when ac is not needed, I have the G5 acting as my space heater. :D
 
MikeL said:
Funny how people forget that about CRTs, eh?

My G5 really is a heater. Heck, all computers are, to one degree or another. My MacBook is slowly roasting my thighs at the moment.
Click to expand...

My G5 was pretty warm all summer, it's nice now though. That upgraded G4 though, goddamn. If I close the window it's like a sauna in here...

contoursvt said:
I was surprised that my 21" Trinitron Dell monitor could not be pushed beyond 117W at max resolution, refresh and a white page. I think CRT's have gotten a bad rap when it comes to power consumption and heat. Yes its bad but its maybe no more than double that of a similar sized LCD. I think people think that an LCD takes like 10W and a CRT takes 300W or something but its not that horribly different :)
Click to expand...

I think people confuse LCD, which is pretty efficient, with Plasma, which is insanely wasteful.
 
I kind of use mine as a heater. If i know it is going to be on most of the day I turn off the heaters in the room. :)
 
I was surprised how cool the Mac Pro runs, considering the power of the thing. My cat enjoys sitting under my desk, but the heat is nothing compared to my SGI Octane2, which I turn on sometimes in the winter just to warm up the room.:)
 
pprior said:
I cannot believe how much heat my mac Pro puts out. My home office (about 12 x 12 foot room) right now is 82 degrees with the door open when the rest of the house is about 75.

It wasn't as bad when I got it, but after upgrading memory it's gotten horrible. I have it under my desk and it literally feels like a space heater.

It really got bad after I added 2 x 2gb chips - have a total of 8GB of ram at this point. Activity monitor shows basically no CPU (<1%).

I wish there was a way to shut the ram OFF when not needed to save the heat. I'm scared to see what it's done to my electric bill as well. I thought Al Gore was on the board at apple?

Anyone else have this experience? If you only have base ram please don't bother to comment as I didn't notice this problem until I put larger amounts in.
Click to expand...

What setting to you have your processor set at? Reduced? Automatic? Highest? If you have it set at highest does it need to be? Because it will max your processor usage, which will in turn kick your fans on to cool it, which in turns blows hot air into your room...

I noticed that when I went and switched my setting to Reduced (fine for web browsing, email, even watching DVD's) that my temps went way down and my machine ran much more quietly...

To change setting go to:

System Prefs>Energy Saver>Options Tab> then select the setting that you need...
 
Tracer said:
Get a Kill-A-Watt and see if the memory really increases the power draw.

I think it's about 20Watts a DIMM which shouldn't make the room that hot.

Tracer
Click to expand...

It's 20 W each DIMM just for the Buffering chip. That's what makes an FB-DIMM an FB-DIMM. The buffering chip. Those chips take 20W each. So if you have four DIMMs, that's 80W, before you even take into account the actual RAM chips.

The big difference between FB-DIMMs and regular DDR(2/3) DIMMs is that the buffer chip is ALWAYS at full power. It is always drawing 20 W, as long as your system is 'awake'. Even if nothing is going through it. DDR chips consume more power when in use than idle. While the DDR chips on the FB-DIMM module are still this way, it's the buffer chip that is the big power hog on the module. So while a DDR2 DIMM may draw 10W idle, 25W in use, an FB-DIMM draws 30W idle, 45W in use. A much smaller (percentage-wise) increase. (Note that I can't find any definitive numbers for how much the DDR chips themselves draw, so I'm guessing 10W idle, 25W load, for 8 chips, so calling that the total power draw of a DDR DIMM, and adding that to an FB-DIMM.)

edit: Here's a good overview.
 
My Mac Pro is a pretty good heater too.
(Quad 3GHz, 8GB, 2x 150GB Raptors, 1x 500GB WD, 2x SuperDrives, and a 24" LCD) With all my extras I'm pulling 420~430 Watts. It just up over 600W when in the Battle Grounds in WoW. The memory (8x 1GB) does consume about 20W each.

My solution ended up being a ceiling fan. Keeping it on medium really helped me out.
 
Does anyone know if the watts that Hardware monitor reports are correct for power supply draw. Because its telling me its around 100 watts(sometimes jumped to 140ish). Which means either the RAM doesn't draw 20 watts a stick, or hardware monitor is incorrect. Because i have 4 modules of ram x 20 watts so 80 watts plus my northbridge is drawing 20 watts. So thats 100 not including CPUs HDs etc etc. Anyone who has a meter it would be great if you could compare it to the hardware monitor read out.:)
 
My Mac Pro made a huge difference when I had it up in my room. Combined with the summer heat, the size of my room, I would sweat while sitting on the computer.

Now that it has replaced the Family PC and has come downstairs to my family room, it hasn't changed the temp at all, and the Mac Pro stays nice and cool to the touch.


(I do such light work these days I run the Mac Pro with one processor)
 
Yeah, my MacPro can really heat up the room it is in (which is already the warmest room in the house), but I am looking at moving, I'll be glad if I get all inclusive before they find out the size (and power requirements) of all my gear.
 
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