Overheat with heavy P2P downloading?

[Billcat]

Here is what happened…

Hot summer started, thirty something Celsius, but with some natural wind it felt okay and I decided to not turn on AC at home.

Weekend time, let’s try how this MacBook performs with games, let’s get Diablo III up and running, to make it happen, first step is to install the Battle.Net client (agent), and the agent client app will take care of the downloading of the game client (14GB).

Broadband worked great and the downloading speed was at 6-8MB/s. If I am not guessing wrong, the agent client uses P2P at background to download all the pieces of files, well, P2P transmission demands some calculations but it should be fine, at the end it is just file transferring…

I was wrong. Only after a couple of GBs of files been downloaded, the overheat message appeared – terminate Agent will be helpful cool down your mac!

What?

When I put my palm under the MacBook to get a feeling of the temperature, I realized that the temp sensor was not malfunctioning – it was hurting, yeah, that hot! It shouldn’t be wrong to call it overheating.

Well, that’s the end of my trying games on this new MacBook, at least for now.

 

[Newtons Apple]

Still think we are a way off from passive cooling on our CPUs.

 

[bibyfok]

Have no problem at all with P2P. I even have done rendering on my rMB 1.2 and never saw the too hot warning...

 

[Toutou]

If the ambient temperature was 30+°C, your WiFi was blazing at full speed, your CPU was computing some checksums and putting the pieces together and your macbook's fans are maybe a little clogged with dust, well.... everything is possible.

 

[tbirdparis]

If the ambient temperature was 30+°C, your WiFi was blazing at full speed, your CPU was computing some checksums and putting the pieces together and your macbook's fans are maybe a little clogged with dust, well.... everything is possible.

Fans? What fans?

 

[bibyfok]

Battle.net P2P system is demanding but I installed D3, WoW, Hots and Hearthstone without any issue.

 

[maflynn]

I can see the rMB getting overly hot. Passive cooling can only do so much and if the ambient tamps are rather high, how much cooling will even occur?

 

[keviig]

There have been issues reported when it comes to the Battle.net client. Many people have had it at almost 100% cpu usage when downloading games. That would be the reason why it overheats.

 

[Billcat]

Quick update.
Using a laptop cooling base (with two fans) and limiting the downloading speed to be <3MB/s, eventually I successfully installed WOW, HOS, D3 and HS, no more overheating issue.

 

[Toutou]

Fans? What fans?

Yeah, maybe I wasn't paying full atention.

 

[keviig]

I downloaded wow (roughly 30gb) the other night on my rMB and i never had any heat issues. The Battle.net downloader topped out at 30% CPU usage. Downloading at 12 MB/s.

I am also able to play at low settings 45-60 fps, actually quite impressing!