Quick help. MBA 2015 hot random and at 50% load? Sound right.

[cha555]

If anyone can help me with this fairly quickly. Last day to return/exchange my new MBA 2015 and it's during finals so I'm kind of in a rush.

I recently upgraded from a mba 11.6 2014 to a mba 2015. I needed the extra screen size. However, this thing surprisingly runs hotter than the 11 version. Initially it was at random times. No load on the cpu, it would get hot. I think it was due to the charger being connected and it seemed especially bad if the USB port was being used as well.

It kind of got better, I ran down the battery a couple of times and that seemed to help. Now there's a little rhyme and reason to it getting hot but the CPU load will only be at 30%-50%. It bothers me because a lot of the time I use it on my lap. And comparatively, the 11.6 would get hot but only during strong loads like 75% and I could hear the fan come on. The rest of the time it was cold. This one gets cold but less often. It's seems like most of the time it's just slightly warm. Also, I don't think I've heard the fan once.

Does this sound right? When I say hot, it's not like burning but yeah it's hot.

Also, the first thing I noticed opening the box was a kind of strong gas smell. It seems like others have had the same experience with this new model. I figure it was because it was just released from the factory. I still believe that but it could be taken into consideration. I've had so many iPads, iPhones, MacBooks none had the smell to them.

 

[motrek]

If anyone can help me with this fairly quickly. Last day to return/exchange my new MBA 2015 and it's during finals so I'm kind of in a rush.

I recently upgraded from a mba 11.6 2014 to a mba 2015. I needed the extra screen size. However, this thing surprisingly runs hotter than the 11 version. Initially it was at random times. No load on the cpu, it would get hot. I think it was due to the charger being connected and it seemed especially bad if the USB port was being used as well.

It kind of got better, I ran down the battery a couple of times and that seemed to help. Now there's a little rhyme and reason to it getting hot but the CPU load will only be at 30%-50%. It bothers me because a lot of the time I use it on my lap. And comparatively, the 11.6 would get hot but only during strong loads like 75% and I could hear the fan come on. The rest of the time it was cold. This one gets cold but less often. It's seems like most of the time it's just slightly warm. Also, I don't think I've heard the fan once.

Does this sound right? When I say hot, it's not like burning but yeah it's hot.

Also, the first thing I noticed opening the box was a kind of strong gas smell. It seems like others have had the same experience with this new model. I figure it was because it was just released from the factory. I still believe that but it could be taken into consideration. I've had so many iPads, iPhones, MacBooks none had the smell to them.

Quickly charging or discharging the battery will cause it to heat up, so it's no big surprise if the laptop heats up when connected to the charger (unless the battery is already full).

Connecting a USB device will cause the battery to discharge or at least for power to go to that device. Depending on how much power the device uses, it's no surprise that the laptop will get hot.

When Activity Monitor says the system is under 50% CPU load, that's actually quite significant. That actually means that both of your cores are under full load, since Activity Monitor thinks you have 4 cores due to hyperthreading. So it says 50% load but that's misrepresenting how much work the CPU is actually doing. In this scenario, best to track down what's using the CPU and see if that's something you expect or not.

 

[cha555]

That makes sense. It's google chrome helper, occasionally it'll start pressing the cpu. Right after the post, I pulled out my mba 11 and began writing a paper to compare the heat. It's actually similar, it hit 30 and started getting warm. So it looks there isn't a problem. Probably just me being a little neurotic, I'm looking to keep this one for a while, plus there's a larger surface area of heat on the 13. Thanks for the info.