A Macbook Pro (MBP) Temperature Poll/Utilities/Help.

This seems to be a topic that is near and dear to many Macbook Pro users' hearts. I am talking of course about how warm our svelte silver friends seem to get.

I am, with all modesty, an expert level of computer user. I have owned and used over a half-a-dozen laptops in my professional life and I have been a Macintosh computer admin for over 10 years. With all that, even I have been surprised by the heat the current generations of MBP generate.

I bought this MBP about 3 weeks ago. I installed a great menubar utility called Temperature Monitor within that first week. I consistently see an idle speed while plugged-in of ~55-60 C. This has spiked all the way up to the mid 80s when under load.

Using SMCFanControl I have been able to raise my system fans to the point where they are still very quiet (3500RPM) but have dropped my idle temps while on A/C 10-15C. I am currently idling at 46C - a great improvement.

Please help this effort out and post your CPU idle temps on this poll - with any luck we can get this made a sticky and help out all those coming in with questions and/or concerns. When you measure please keep the following things in mind:

• Make sure your MBP is plugged-in to external power (the CPU cycles way down when on battery, thus lowering the temps a good deal, but it's too hard to measure all the variables at that point)
• Please be in a normal indoor environment with ambient temps at a normal human comfort-level (72-76 F would be great)
• Measure your temps over a period of at least an hour, with general use programs running. Programs that video encode and games will obviously spike the temps
• Please post your temps at stock, from the factory settings. This should be 2000RPM on both fans. Also, if you have modified your heatsink or applied an aftermarket thermal paste, please don't vote in the poll.
• If you want to provide a bit more detail in the thread below by all means do so! You can use the following as a template:
  
  CPU A : 44C
  EB (Enclosure Bottomside): 28C
  Running apps: Firefox, Entourage, Azureus
  Fan RPMs: 2000RPM​

Please feel free to post any and all advise you can share in the main body of the post and I will re-summarize it all when appropriate.

Many thanks!

Useful Thermal Utilities

• Temperature Monitor - A menubar utility that shows nearly every thermal sensor in the computer.
• SMC Fan Control - A menubar utility that allows manual control of the system fans. Can be set to automatically control the fans based on A/C status and charging status.
• iStat Pro Dashboard Widget - This is a must-have for nearly any current Mac user, and it will allow monitoring without downloading the other utilities. It may be overkill if all you want to do is monitor temps.

 

I assume by normal you're referring to use without the aid of coolers or software-controlled fans (i.e. at the default 2k rpm)?

 

Yes.

Perhaps I should add "stock" to the description?

Fixed, thanks!

 

For that matter you need to consider another important variable, the environmental temperature. For example, I'm operating in a 21°C air-conditioned room. This will influence virtually all other temperature readings (including the CPU).

Edit: You should also edit the temperature ranges so they do not overlap. For example, <40, 40-45, 46-50, 51-55, ...

 

These are very good points, but this is all approximation anyway. That said, I think it would be good to add "a normal indoor ambient temp" to the description

-Fixed, added a list of how to measure

 

CPU A: 44C in an room thats roughly 20C the surface your using it on would also affect this, its very easy to block the vents with some surfaces.

great idea for a poll though

 

CPU A: 43C in my lap for about an hour and a half with airport on and browsing /downloading, iTunes in the background, yahoo messenger too.

 

Thank for the replies guys and gals, keep em coming!

Please make sure you are plugged in when conducting these tests. Also, if you want to post as a few others have done with some specifics you could add the Enclosure Bottomside sensor for a closer (but still not great) approximation of the ambient temps.

With Firefox and Entourage (running through Rosetta, of course) I am at 42 C after just waking my MBP from sleep, the Enclosure Bottomside (EB?) reads 28 C. I have another sensor in the room about 1 ft away that reads 27 C.

Maybe we need a template to follow? Like:

CPU A : 44C
EB: 28C
Running apps: Firefox, Entourage, Azureus
Fan RPMs: 2000RPM

 

is there any apps like these for windows? check temps, fan speeds.

thanks

 

Using a griffin elevator and fans set at ~3k rpm my Macbook pro is usually 40-45c.

With fans at the default 2k rpm it runs at mid to high 40s all the way up to around 52-53c.

 

My mbp idles at 45-50 f ,but when i run all these apps at the same time(see attachment ) it runs at about 80f and ambient temp in my apartment is 80f .And yea by the way mbp is Wicked fast.

 

You sure you aren't running at 45-50 C? That is like 114-130 F. 80 C is about 176 F

Yeah, you might want to check out that SMCFanControl and just let the fans run at a higher rate than normal. I have been testing a few temps under load and when running at the max (6000RPM) the temps stay in the low to mid 70s


Yes, these muthas ARE fast. Our notebooks are currently so much faster than our PPC G5s that we pass projects that envolve alot of encoding off to them. Saves HOURS.

 

my bad i was gonna say celcius , so those temps are in celcius , imessed up

 

2.0 dual core (pre june 06) - 64 C running safari fan is running 1 k each. I have had the fan, the bottom case, and a few other things replaced already... now i need a keyboard... this thing feels worn out...

 

Any chance on getting this stickied or perhaps rolled into another sticky?

 

CPU A: 52
EB: 34
Fans: 2000/2000

I am on AC power with a relatively high ambient temp of 30C == 86 F

Running apps, I don't know about 3 dozen... who's counting when you have 4GB RAM..

Guess I am going to get that fan tuning program, I want to be able to control my own heat/noise trade-offs. And esp. plugged in the MBP needs to turn up those fans more.

Update: Tried smcFanControl. Nice program, but it's surprising how the fan speed doesn't make much difference for either enclosure bottom or hard drive temps. @4000 RPM the fans are still pretty silent, and the CPU temp goes down to 46. But EB and hard disk temps are still at 35 and 40, respectively.

 

I am using SMC fan control ... set to 3000rpm both fans.... and am using an ilap underneath my macbook pro ...
gives me temperatures of about 37-38 C with the AC at 74-75F ...

 

Wow its been a while since i've posted up in here!

Anyways Just got my hands on a MBP well its my 2nd one. First one i had was a MBP Core Duo 2.16ghz and how i've got the sr Core 2 duo 2.4ghz. and i'm loving it!

 

Try speedfan


My mbp runs at around 50* when doing nothing at stock fan speeds. Right now I have SMC keeping the fans at 3k rpm, and with code compiling in Dev C++ through parallels I have a temp of 63*