Got My New MB, Heat Question

Well I purchased my new MB today and I must say its pretty nice except for the amount of heat. I have it plugged in on the normal setting, and the bottom gets hotter than my MBP plugged in on the normal setting. I was hoping the MB would run cooler than the MBP. Could there be an issue? I hear the fans running, so I know they work. What are other people's experiences?

 

Did you monitor your temps?

 

I did notice my MB got a little warm. Nothing to write home about. Not nearly as hot as the vomit comet, ahem I mean my old Dell. I suggest you get a fan hack: smcfancontrol. It allows you to monitor temps which is what I use it for. It also would allow you to adjust your fans to run more aggressively. I have not bothered with this feature. Lastly, there is the istatpro widget for dashboard which shows a whole group of temperatures in its display.

hope this helps...

 

What temps do you see under normal conditions?

 

Just checked with the widget you suggested. my CPU is 58 degrees celcius and my airport card is 59. Those are the two hottest parts of my system.

 

I watched my cpu go up to 78 degrees celcius before the fans even kicked above 2000 rpms. Then they went up to 6000 rpms. Is that normal? That seems pretty darn hot.

 

I don't remember my cpu ever going above about 50 something. It's sitting at 50 right now with fans at 1800. Every so often, I hear the fans rev up but it's pretty rare.

Are you using cpu intensive software at the time it gets hot? Do you have a LOT of apps running in the doc at the time? I rarely have cpu load above 25% in istat pro.

High load = high heat = short life. To accelerate failure of electronics, testing is often done at elevated temperature. You can cram years of wear into weeks of testing by doing it at elevated temperature. You should find your temp problem and solve it soon.

If not, I see a genius bar visit in your future. Make sure you've disabled any fan hacks before you take it in.

Wait. It went to 54 c during a time machine backup just now. Still, it's not catching fire or anything. I took a look in istat pro and it's up to 57c at the cpu with time machine still humming along. Now that time machine is done, it's falling again, back down to 54 c.

 

Anything around 50C - 70C is perfectly normal. If you are getting temps above 80C then you should maybe be a little concerned. But I have had my notebook get up to 101C before without many serious issues.

 

No it got up to 78 degrees celcius surfing the Internet and transfering some files from an external HDD. Thats it. CPU load was maybe 2 or 3 percent.

 

man, if that's a penryn that seems pretty hot. full load on my sager2092, i've hit 56c but went down quick when fan kicked higher. my cpu usually peaks at 42-45c.

 

Maybe try undervolting the processor? I'm not sure if this is different between macs + pc's but the process seems simple enough.

 

Yeah, but I should not need to undervolt the processor. My MBP runs cooler than this.

 

true. hmmmmm

 

Yeah, my SR MacBook runs around those temperatures.

 

my 2.5ghz MBP still gets hot underneath when plugged in and running for like 30-40 min....on battery is completely fine...

 

Those temps seem completely normal to me.

 

Well I returned it. I may either get an Air (Willaim you might have been right) lol. Or just keep using my MBP