Screensaver "temperature"

I downloaded a few screensavers for my Macbook. One was xscreensavers which comes with over 200 screensavers. Others included snowflakes and liquids and an animated view out an airplane window and a really gross bugs one.

I also played with some of the built in ones. The photo collection is the best one. The leftmost option is ok, the middle one is cool, but the rightmost option? Too cool. It takes your photos and makes collages out of them. The collages are of your photos. So you start by looking at one of your photos then it zooms out and you see hundreds of your photos as tiles which make up... you guessed it, another one of your photos. Way cool.

Here's the problem. If I leave bugs active, I'd better not leave the top of my rolltop desk down or I'll start a fire. It is in the class of folding at home when it comes to cpu heat. I can't easily remember which ones were the worst offenders for heat but I know I can't leave bugs running so there's no way I'm planning to register that shareware no matter how cool it is to see myself in moving bug pixels. Yeah, it's gross. You can turn the bugs to dots if you get tired of looking at what looks like a ****roach infestation inside your Macbook. But even when they're dots and the cpu doesn't have to worry about animating all those little legs the cpu still gets hot.

The default screensavers are all safe. No firestarters there. But be careful of the add-on screensavers as some of them cross the line. A screensaver should be cool looking but should not use as much cpu as transcoding a blueray movie. A quick and dirty way to spot the big offenders is if the preview causes cpu temp to jump. I use smcfancontrol to put cpu temp right up in my face so while I'm working I can see what's going on.

Here are my picks for Cool screensavers (they look nice and don't overheat your cpu):

1 - snowfall
2 - pictures (Leopard built in - tile/mosaic mode)
3 - earthclock
4 - offshoots
5 - xanalogtv (yeah baby! - it helps if you have some old beverly hillbillies or munsters images sitting in iphoto )
6 - starwars - put your fav rss feed on and it scrolls like the intro to starwars
7 - polytopes
8 - bumps
9 - spotlight
10 - blocktube
11 - hypertorus
12 - eruption
13 - liquid mac - very similar to eruption. it's not a saver but it's cool if you have a newer mac notebook - I'm leveling with you about this one
14 - dangerball
15 - carousel
16 - escher - i mean cage
17 - blaster
18 - antspotlight

Here are my picks for Hot screensavers
these are for when you don't mind your cpu getting warm ( smoke 'em if you got 'em!)
1 - bugs - gross but cool, well hot
2 - holding pattern coach
3 - folding at home ( leave this running too long unattended and proteins won't be the only things getting folded)
4 - engine (i haven't observed this one getting hot - but any of the gl-based savers that offer to show frame rate are good candidates for heating things up)
5 - menger - starts out simple enough but rapidly goes to a very complex 3d shape spinning in space and the slower framerate gives me enough doubt to put this one on the hot list - it's borderline because it toggles between simple and complex shapes but I think it belongs down here.
6 - sonar (gives pings to things it sees - cool - ran a little hot when i tested it - not sure why)
7 - atlantis - dolphins and sharks - fps stays at 30 which implies cpu load isn't that bad but my cpu temp climbed a few degrees watching this one full screen
8 - bubbles3d
9 - lotsawater (this one heat ups on my favorite settings)

The real down side to the hot picks is if your fan has to spin up while you're gone to work or in bed sleeping. Definitely not a good use of resources if that happens for a screensaver.

Wallsaver
Now comes a little extra fun. Pick one you like then run wallsaver and it becomes your desktop wallpaper. No more waiting for it to kick in. Of course, if you walk away and the real screensaver kicks in, when you come back your old wallpaper is back and you have to run wallsaver again if you want your screensaver to be your wallpaper. Wallsaver isn't the only freebie app that does this but Wallsaver is the one I found first and grabbed.

 

My favorite screensaver is Amseq.
It works on OS 10.3 and 10.4.
I don't have 10.5 to try it with.

 

Nice! It works fine on 10.5 but it winds up on my hot list as cpu temp went up 6 degrees and the fan got louder with the thing running in crazy mode. Very cool, though.