rMBP fan speed issue

[conqueso]

I've had a rMBP (2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 16GB ram with solid state drive 10.8.2) for a little over 3 weeks. For the most part it's only gotten hot when I use it on my lap, and the fans have been kicking up when I'd expect them to. Last night afterr I installed and was running the Folding@Home application I noticed the fans went up to maximum speed and were the loudest I've heard them yet. This didn't bother because I was running a program that's probably somewhat taxing on my CPU in addition to the fact that I'd been using the computer on my lap for several hours. I decided to shut down for the night. In the morning upon booting the fans kicked up after ~20 seconds and continued to stay at a high RPM even though I had no programs running and the computer had been sitting in a cool room all night.

I've tried resetting the SMC, which resulted in the fans being at max RPM nonstop from the second I hit the power button until shutdown. I reset the SMC again and it went back to the previous state, where the fans kick up after 20 seconds or less.

I've read of other people having similar problems over the past couple of months with rMPBs but so far have not heard of the problem being resolved. My iStat readouts are:


HD: Macintosh... 112
CPU/ Heatsink 122
Airport Card 121
Enclosure Base 92
Enclosure Base 2 92
Enclosure Base 3 85
GPU 140
GPU Diode 155

Right Fan ~5500 RPM
Left Fan ~5900 RPM

 

[BlaqkAudio]

Folding@Home autostarts at login. It's probably maxing out your CPU and causing your fans to kick in on max speed. If you want to disable autostart, I believe you just delete /Library/LaunchDaemons/Folding@home.plist

 

[conqueso]

Folding@Home autostarts at login. It's probably maxing out your CPU and causing your fans to kick in on max speed. If you want to disable autostart, I believe you just delete /Library/LaunchDaemons/Folding@home.plist

Folding@Home is not running according to Activity Monitor. I checked Library/LaunchDaemons/ just to be sure and there is no Folding@home.plist file in there

 

[throAU]

Find out how to properly uninstall folding@home and verify if the problem still happens without it. I suspect it is still running as a unix daemon somehow and not an OS X specific/visible program.

Due to the nature of turbo boost, running a program that maxxes your CPU (as folding @ home will, it will consume all the CPU idle time) will cause it to get hot and fans to come on.

Folding @ home on a portable machine is a bad idea, it will murder your battery life, too.

 

[conqueso]

that was it!! thank you both so much. There was indeed a file living in /Library/LaunchDaemons but it had a slightly different name so I overlooked it at first. Lesson learned, no Folding@Home on a laptop!

 

[0r30]

My rMBP seems to do the same when running Microsoft Outlook on my laptop.

I have the same specifications as you.