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RMBP Keys warm to the touch

M

mrmarts

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Hey all

I just noticed that my 15" Retina Macbook keys are warm to the touch is this normal given they light up. FYI the laptop is running quiet should i be concerned.
 
The keys are right above the two processors that are in your computer. They should be warm, as long as your computer is on. 😉
 
It is normal do not worry, the rMBP's are so compact and small everything is not very far away from anything else lol and some of the components like the GPU and CPU do get warm with normal operation. What you are feeling is the radiated heat coming from those components which are a very short distance away from your keys, the heat is soaking out into the keyboard and surrounding components and this is how it is supposed to be.

The lights behind the keys will be provided by low voltage LED's and these do not give off any heat at all (relatively speaking) even when they have been turned up to their highest setting for a few hours.
 
Thanks for the informed feedback, i now can breathe a sigh of relief not to take my macbook for repairs.
 
Hey guys I installed istat to monitor my macbooks temperature and found that with only a web browser open and one app candybar that my laptops temperature is about 74 degrees is this normal. The fan doesn't omit no noises when in use and the temp is known to fluctuate on this machine to 80 degrees for short periods.

My warranty will end come july should i be concerned and take it in for repairs, or seeing the machine is quiet i have nothing to concern myself with, about this issue.
 
mrmarts said:
Hey guys I installed istat to monitor my macbooks temperature and found that with only a web browser open and one app candybar that my laptops temperature is about 74 degrees is this normal. The fan doesn't omit no noises when in use and the temp is known to fluctuate on this machine to 80 degrees for short periods.

My warranty will end come july should i be concerned and take it in for repairs, or seeing the machine is quiet i have nothing to concern myself with, about this issue.
Click to expand...

74 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit is very cool for a computer.
74 to 80 degrees Celsius is very warm, and should have your fans on full-blast.
 
My 2 day old rMBP doesn't make much noise at all as regards the fans, even when playing a game like Borderlands 2 where the temperatures will be around that sort of level according to iStat2. So I wouldn't be overly worried, I am sure Apple won't mind giving your MacBook a look over though.

Interestingly I can reproduce a bug in ML, if I install the Safari extension ClickToFlash then watch a video on Youtube that is more than 2 minutes long. The fans on my MBP go mental and spin up to 100% then slow down again to normal levels. The ramp up in speed is completely unrelated to temperatures which stay at a nominal low level and the slow ramp up to speed and back down again takes about 60 seconds.

If you look as the fan speed graph in iStat2 you see an almost perfect peak with slopes that are exactly the same angle on both sides, like this /\ except there is a flat peak where the fan stays at full speed for about 5 or 10 seconds before it starts to slow down again. The temperature graphs remain flat in comparison..

If I disable ClickToFlash so that YouTube streams Flash instead of HMTL5, then the temperatures remain exactly the same as before but the fans do not spin up to speed at all, even a two hour long video on Youtube didn't cause the fans to ramp up in speed.
 
Laptops in general run hot. i7 CPUs run even hotter. Fact of life. 60C idle is pretty normal- across 3 generations of i7 quad core mobile CPUs (Nehalem, SB and IB) and computers from a few manufacturers (HP, Dell, Lenovo, Apple) I've found this to be true.

The impressive part is that the cooling system is good enough that even under enough load to hit 80C, the fans are still running at their idle 2000RPM. The other systems I mentioned, with the exception of the Lenovo, would idle their fans at a very audible 3500RPM.

Until you hit 105C there's no reason to worry.
 
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