Getting A Hand-Me-Down 13" MBP

Hello notebook review,

This is my first mac and i must say that its very intimidating. I finished installing Boot Camp w/ Windows 7 Home Premium and it works like it a charm

However playing League of Legends on Medium settings with second to lowest resolution made the MBP pretty warm. I play on a wooden desk, (school desk). Soon, i'm gonna play Starcraft II with pretty high settings (MBP has 2.7 ghz, 4g ram) and Sim's 3 soon.

My question is there any cooling pads/ heatsinks/ tilts that may help with cooling down the system?

 

StarCraft II won't run very ell on high on that system. Even with the Core i7, your GPU is still too weak. The Sims 3 may run decent though.

 

I'm really confused by your thread. Your title says " Getting a hand-me-down MBP" yet your post really doesn't have anything to do with your thread title, plus it sounds like you already got it. Then you say that it's intimidating yet you installed Windows and played games on it without issue. Are you even using OS X? You never even mentioned what was intimidating about it and then you basically asked about cooling pads? None of your thread coincides with your post title.
Did you need help with anything in particular such as using OS X or is this just about cooling pads because this isn't making sense.

 

Cooling pads also aren't going to help. The ventilation system on the MBP is at the hinge where the display hooks up to the body of the notebook. A cooling pad would help if the MBP had vents on the bottom but it doesn't. A cooling pad would help cool the outside aluminum casing by (maybe) 1 degree C if you are lucky. Don't waste your money on any external cooling system.

The MBP has a aluminum body. Apply a little science and metal acts as a good heat conductor, not insulator. Excessive tasks, such as gaming, are going to cause the CPU and IGP to increase their speeds and thus produce more heat. That heat is going to be transferred from the inside of the MBP to the outside of its body through the aluminum. It is perfectly normal. You MBP's fans are also going to run more excessively when booting into Wndows due to terrible drivers from Apple. The cooling fans tend to be either off or all the way on in Wndows while they have better control in OS X.

This leads me to my final point: if you are going to be in Windows 7 the majority of the time, you might as well sell that notebook and buy a model that was built for running Windows and has a dedicated GPU that will outperform the Intel integrated graphics in your MBP. There is absolutely no point in owning a Mac yet running an OS the machine wasn't designed to fully work with. Boot Camp serves as a means of running Windows when need be, it was never meant to make Windows a permanent option on Macs. There a few people who (unwisely) use Windows as their primary OS on their Mac. They can do whatever they want with the product they purchased but they represent an extreme minority of Mac users and an even smaller niche here in the forums.