Open 17" MBP up in store, fire it up and...

[snaky69]

Posts 7 and 15.

On a laptop it's a given. If it runs warm, there will be blood, er, I mean fan.

If it idles with a medium fan, than that is as good as it gets right? But it looks like some people are getting higher than 40C idle temps and no fan noise, so that is encouraging. That Sony I had was a hair dryer. Performance was good, but I could not live with it. Fan was always audible and it only got louder under load.

But thanks anyway, I know you mean well.

The fans on a MBP are always on, idle is 2000rpm, and it shouldn't budge from that unless you're actually doing something.

My early 2008 non-unibody MBP idles at 53C, I currently have preview, excel, itunes, ical, safari, mail and msn messenger open

If you're anyway under 40C, to me, that's all good.

 

[iZero]

There's no reason to worry about it. The web is full of armchair engineers who think they know better than the engineers that are paid and trained well to design these products, what these machines should run at temperature wise. Macs always run a little warmer than other machines. They are designed to. It happens. It's supposed to. Now, some people may be uncomfortable with the machine working as designed, and choose to modify things, or install a fan control application, etc. and there's nothing wrong with that, it's their computer But it doesn't mean there is any kind of flaw or problem with the design or function of the machine itself.

It's obviously true that someone didn't bother to show the factory workers how to apply thermal paste. But if you buy one and it develops a problem because of that, or anything else related to failures/defects, you are covered 100% and have nothing to worry about. Temperature varies based on a huge number of factors, even at just "idle". If you try to refuse a laptop on site based on temperatures, you're going to have one very long day there getting them to play along Unless it's sitting at like, 80c or something idling...

 

[sk3tch]

MBP fans are never off while the MBP is running. They are always running at a minimum of around 2000 rpm.

Well, I mean inaudible. My mistake.

 

[kfscoll]

It's off. It kicks in when I run anything intensive - like I was running Handbrake runs for another thread in this forum - it got up to 91 C but went down after the fan ran.

In general it is not very loud or annoying in Mac OS X.

This has been my experience with my new 15" MBP as well. It's really nothing to worry about.