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rMBP Fan Won't Stop Spinning

C

cliff.berinti

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 23, 2012
11
0
I may be asking this too soon and without enough tinkering as I just got my rMBP last night, but it ran perfectly fine until I closed it when I was done using it. Once I did this, the fan started to spin up. It didn't bother me too much, but then I came back 15 minutes later and it was still spinning at full force. I opened it and tinkered around a bit, and it never spun down even with all of my applications closed. I finally gave up and shut it down and it stopped. I then woke up this morning and the laptop was spinning again (I had not touched it since shutting it down). I messed with it for a while but had to go to work, so I just shut it down and it stopped. Has anyone else had this happen? Should I just make sure I can reproduce it and bring it up to Apple?

Thanks,
Cliff
 
cliff.berinti said:
I may be asking this too soon and without enough tinkering as I just got my rMBP last night, but it ran perfectly fine until I closed it when I was done using it. Once I did this, the fan started to spin up. It didn't bother me too much, but then I came back 15 minutes later and it was still spinning at full force. I opened it and tinkered around a bit, and it never spun down even with all of my applications closed. I finally gave up and shut it down and it stopped. I then woke up this morning and the laptop was spinning again (I had not touched it since shutting it down). I messed with it for a while but had to go to work, so I just shut it down and it stopped. Has anyone else had this happen? Should I just make sure I can reproduce it and bring it up to Apple?

Thanks,
Cliff
Click to expand...
Try resetting the SMC.

Also,
  1. Launch Activity Monitor
  2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
  3. Click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
  4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
  5. Take a screen shot of the whole Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
  6. Post your screenshots.
 
Thanks for the quick response GGJstudios, I'll do this as soon as I am home later today.
 
Here are the screenshots. So it had spun up since I had first got on it at home and then closed it. When I got back on it kept spinning for a minute or two, then slowly sun down and by the time I got to taking the screen caps the fan completely stopped. I'm not sure if that affects what you are trying to see. One other thing to note is that the laptop is extremely "slow" when I wake it up and it is spinning; anything from scrolling to using spotlight to open Activity Monitor.

Screen Shot 2012-06-29 at 7.50.16 PM.png​

Screen Shot 2012-06-29 at 7.49.40 PM.png​
 
Last edited:
I'm having exactly the same problem. Every time I put the MBPr to sleep within maybe 10 seconds or so the fan starts going and doesn't stop. I first noticed in when I took a flight to Philly earlier this week, pulled it out of my bag and the fan was blasting the laptop was hot, and the battery was near drained.

After trying all sorts of things, I decided to go back to square one with a fresh OS install, I ended up putting Mountain Lion 4 as I had it on USB key, to re-install Lion over the network was looking like a 24 hour ordeal.

Anyway with a fresh install I'm still having the same problem. Ran the full hardware test, no issues.

When I start up I notice that kernel_task is using 600%+ of the CPU. See screen shot attached to this post.

Tried reset SMC, it's hard to tell if that really did anything but it didn't fix the problem.

Looks like it's going back to apple, but if anyone has any ideas please let me know. I guess I'm not the only one having this problem so maybe someone has figured it out....

Thanks!
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2012-06-30 at 3.40.33 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2012-06-30 at 3.40.33 PM.png
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Definitely something weird going on. The fan on my rMPB has literally only ever comes on while I'm transcoding H.264 video. I haven't had it come on in any other situation, including some relatively processing heavy tasks.
 
Intenost said:
When I start up I notice that kernel_task is using 600%+ of the CPU.
Click to expand...
I seem to remember reading something about this specific issue a few months back, but I can't recall what the solution was at the moment. If I think of it, I'll post it. I guess it's time to re-index my memory! :D
 
So it isn't just me. I went to the genius bar today, and because they didn't have a network or external drive that could boot the rMBP, they decided to just give me a new one. Thus far I haven't had the same issues. I'm going to pay careful attention to any third party software I install, but I went down the list of the couple of things I had installed (Spotify, Chrome, Web Dev tools, Apache, SwitchResX, etc), but the guy at the bar said none of those should cause the machine to spin up like that. You might be able to figure out more from them, but I was happy to save time and just take home a new one. I'm just glad I had it for such a short amount of time and didn't configure too terribly much. Best of luck with yours, and let us know if you find out more.

I think this is a great example of why Apple's customer service is so awesome (assuming it is under warranty). Thanks Apple!
 
Google for chrome not behaving well on rMBP...could that have been the culprit?

Lucky that they had one to give you, and at this point it must have been a new one (not a refurb)!
 
Genius bar ran diags but couldn't find a h/w issue.

I re-installed Lion (I had tried Mountain Lion to see if that fixed the problem), and the same problem occurred with just out of the box O/S installed, and none of my migrated software or settings.

So, I exchanged it for a new one. Still in the box, but I'll test it out later tonight.
 
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