MacBook Pro running hot - again!

Mon, 13 November 2006

I bought my MacBook Pro (Core Duo, 1.83 GHz) in late April 2006 and apart from the heat issues I haven’t had any other problems that many (most) users have experienced, such as mooing, battery problems, stuck DVDs and so on.

OK, to be honest I had one stuck DVD, but that’s all in about eight months.

In May I downloaded and installed the SMC firmware update for MBP and that has fixed the temperature issues, the computer has been running very cool ever since. When idling, or just browsing, it would sit somewhere around 45C (113F) or so. When giving it a bit of work to do, it would go a bit over 50C (122F), and only under heavy load it would get over 60C (140F).

temperature_mbp.jpg

But lately, I’ve noticed that my computer is running hot again. No, not only hot, it’s actually running very hot !

At the moment, I have only two applications running, the Mail app and Firefox, where I’m typing this. While in this state, the computer should be ‘freezing’, but no - it’s running at 57C (135F). If I open iTunes and play something, it would go well over 60 degrees (140F).

I’m also using the smcFan Control, running fans at twice the normal speed. If I shut that down I may as well add a few more degrees to my new barbeque computer.

A friend of mine mentioned he read somewhere that smcFC may be showing incorrect temperature, but CoreDuo Temp is showing the same, so I have no doubt the temperature is what these two apps show. Even without them, the thing is just plainly hot.

Then I thought, what might be the reason for this sudden change in the temperature? And the only one thing that comes to mind is the OS X update to 10.4.8. I have updated it about 5 weeks ago and when I think back, this may as well be when the problem started.

Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour with their CoreDuo MacBook Pros since upgrading to 10.4.8 ?

[tags] MacBook Pro, heat, OS-X [/tags]

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Category Posted in Hardware, Mac

32 Responses to “MacBook Pro running hot - again!”

  1. JC said: Tue, 14 November 2006 at 01:22

    I’ve noticed the increase in temperature too. It’s only been a problem for the last 2 or 3 weeks, so I don’t think it’s associated with the 10.4.8 release.

    The only major change to my computer was an upgrade to Firefox 2.0 a few weeks ago. Hmmm….

  2. Miami_Mac said: Tue, 14 November 2006 at 01:36

    Mine has also been running hot, but I attribute it to the 10.4.8 upgrade.

    I have not installed Firefox 2.

    I posted an entry, a couple of weeks ago, in the http://www.dslreports.com Mac forum and people thought I was crazy.

    I am glad that I am not the only one experiencing this issue. (Misery loves company)

  3. subcorpus said: Tue, 14 November 2006 at 07:03

    hello …
    i have a macbook pro … and OS X updated to 10.4.8 …
    i dont experience any over heating …
    i dont have firefox … i use opera … and safari …
    so … hmmm …

  4. rahrens said: Thu, 16 November 2006 at 22:41

    Have you installed the new firmware update yet? Do that and check to see if there is any difference…

  5. ddanger said: Fri, 1 December 2006 at 00:10

    what i am amazed at is, people slate microsoft, but my macbook core duo, has more problems with software than my entire time using windows … apple suck and now i cant even get a cd out, even with all the techniques you suggest, thats after returning a brand new macbook for eating my cds, actually grinding them up :( apple you suck …

  6. kdillman said: Tue, 12 December 2006 at 01:33

    I purchased a Mac Book Pro this weekend and was very impressed with how cool the machine operated. That is, until I installed the 10.4.8 release. After that, the temp has soared to the untouchable range. I attribute the temp problem to the release.

  7. Mira said: Tue, 12 December 2006 at 22:08

    Hi,

    I installed the SMC Firmware last week and since I cannot use my MacBook without the power cord. I remember while installing the Firmware the machine got very noisy. I thought I had changed the battery settings, but after many failed adjustments its clear the battery has gone dead. Even the battery light on the bottom illuminated just one dot!

    I hope there is there something Apple is doing about this problem? Because it really is a nuisance! Moreover, the support from my local MAC dealer in Dubai has been ‘0′… After 25mins on hold they still weren’t able to hunt down one person who could actually help me!

    If anyone on this blog has had the same experience and been able to successfully solve it, your help will be invaluable at this stage.

    Thanks,
    M

  8. rudy said: Tue, 16 January 2007 at 10:32

    My macbook pro has been operating at temps around 60-75 degres Celcius. I have updated to 10.4.8, I have firefox, I am almost certain the problem has been going on since I got it. How hot is too hot that it is affecting the life of the motherboard and cpu?

  9. Noel said: Wed, 14 March 2007 at 18:27

    With the recent update ive also noticed a remarkable increase in temps! so i would probably give credit to the 10.4.8 release….pray that leopard will fix these problems!

  10. Ryan said: Thu, 26 April 2007 at 12:13

    I’ve had a serious case of over-heating just now, so I was searching for an answer and stumbled across this blog. I have since found the answer just now so I thought I would post a response.

    My macbook pro cpu was over 60 degrees at the time. I use a laptop cooler fan that sits underneath my MBP, and I run SMC fan control regularly at 2000rpm (twice the default). Usually im between 45-50. Apparently what was causing this was a frozen dashboard widget which was consuming about 70% of my total processor. I found this defect after opening Acivity Monitor. I restarted the widget and my temperatures are back to normal.

    So try opening activity monitor to find what program may be consuming a large portion of your processing power.

  11. jp said: Wed, 23 May 2007 at 22:34

    It’s a good idea to have something like menumeters running on your mac. Then you can see when your CPU is pegged, which will always bring your laptop temperature way up.

    Hopefully those with dead batteries have noticed the battery recall from Apple. I got my new battery in about 3 days after calling them and it’s been great.

    Cheers.

  12. Matthias said: Sun, 17 June 2007 at 01:28

    I’m using a white MacBook 2.0GhZ, 2Gb Ram. Currently have a Cooler Master aluminium lap cooler, running SMC fan control at 4000rpm. My MB usually stay cool but recently have soared up to 70 degrees Celsius. I isolated the programs and found that only 2 applications will provoke that temperature, i.e. Opera Browser, and WarCraft 3 - Frozen Throne.

    Wonder if anybody got the same situation.

  13. jon said: Sat, 14 July 2007 at 02:13

    Matthias, i have just recently had the same problem. I used to always play Frozen Throne with no problems but it wasn’t until the last update that my computer began overheating and locking up. Have you discovered the actual source of the problem?

  14. Angel said: Wed, 25 July 2007 at 13:34

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Scottuary
    Hey all,

    I’m new to these forums but have been following them for a long time. I bought a new SR Macbook Pro and it’s great. The problem is it seems to keep freezing after 2-3 hours of use. It happened three times last night when I was transferring all my files over from my PC. And it happened again tonight. I’m a little worried it’s a hardware problem.

    The mouse freezes, everything on the screen freezes and I can’t do anything but reboot. If music is playing it stutters. Could this be a heat problem?

    ***********************************************************

    Hi guys!

    I desperately need as much help as I can get, as I need to act pretty quickly in case I need to get my new macbook pro replaced. Here’s my story. I purchased my macbook pro (2.4ghz, 256 Nvidia 8800, 160 hard drive) on July 19, 2007. Everything was running smoothly until I started playing Second Life on it. I noticed that after playing Second Life for about 10 or 15 minutes the fans on my macbook pro would to start running quite loudly. Once the fans started everything slowed down and eventually froze just as Scott described earlier. I have called apple and they told me to remove the battery and restart the computer while pressing the apple key, CTRL and P+R. That was done… and it seemed to be a bit better but then it crashed again. I have since installed the smc-fan application and have it runing at 3600. Any other ideas? I mean… do I really have to get a new macbook pro even though everything else is running ok?

    Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

    Thanks

    Angel

  15. Leander said: Thu, 26 July 2007 at 17:37

    I would not say that my computer ever ran cool, but there has definately been a significant increase in temperature since I bought it at the first release. I don’t know when it happened so I can’t say if 10.4.8 was the culprit. I’ll say, 10.4.10 sure didn’t do anything to fix the problem.

    At the moment, the only programs I am running are Safari and Mail. This is pretty typical, though I may have Word, iTunes, and iChat running in addition to the other two programs at particularly busy moments. However, even just running these two measely programs, if I were to turn off SMC, my CPU temp would skyrocket from 45 to 80C in a few minutes.

    I haven’t had any other problems whatsoever with my Mac. It’s a million times better than my VAIO laptop, which ran loud, hot, and slow. Still, I wonder how long it will take for my fans to die and my processor to melt!

  16. George G said: Thu, 26 July 2007 at 22:00

    Same problem here, I actually think my computer is running at 63C with only Firefox, Adium and iTunes on, while when i start recording with Logic Pro 7 it actually goes up to the 80s. I keep on moving my computer on the table to “cool it off” cuz I am afraid it will overheat or explode. If Apple does not fix this problem we might all have to get ice packs :( or throw away this thing because right now it’s too hot to put it on my lap!

  17. Ben said: Thu, 2 August 2007 at 04:18

    Hi all. My story will may be worry some of you at first, but let me say it ended well for me.
    I have a MacBook Pro 17″ and since first buying it it was running farily hot, burning my legs etc. Hotter than my previous Silver G5 laptop.

    I contacted Mac and asked them about it and was told all was well, they had heard of no problems (but this was about a month after release). Then one day after use in excess of ten hours and shutting down the machine and closing the lid down something strange happened. Next time I opened the lid I had a cracked screen. As I had left the machine on my desk at work my first reaction was that someone had leant on it. After quotes of £600 plus to fix and numerous discussions with apple asking whether this was connected to the overheating I decided to take it to the local Apple Store. The day before this however I noticed that the laptop was no-longer sitting flat on the desk. When I turned it over the battery had actually expanded.

    Long and short is that the guy at the Apple store said that a chemical reation in the battery had made it ‘expand’ and because it was so hot when I shut the lid down it actually cracked the LCD panel in the screen. Apple not only changed the battery but replaced the screen. They done it the same day, within two hours. Can’t fault them for service. My advice to anyone is go into your local apple store if you can, you will get a better deal than you will from an Apple Care phone call. If they can see or feel what you are talking about it helps.

    And here is the final and best part. I was outside my 1 year warranty period, had no extended warranty cover, but they still fixed it free of charge. I guess I was lucky, but I have this ‘New’ MacBook Pro and a MacPro too and I love em both. Apple are great.

    Though I am going to invest in a cooling stage for the Laptop. £24 - can’t do any harm.

    All the best

  18. Steven said: Sat, 11 August 2007 at 06:45

    I dont think mine ever cooled… ugh 71 right now on istatpro on CPU A

  19. Lorna said: Sun, 2 September 2007 at 05:26

    How do you know how hot your computer is? Surely a stupid question. Mine gets so hot sometimes I think it is going to melt?

  20. peter said: Mon, 3 September 2007 at 01:51

    My MBP 15″ is running iChat, Safari and i am continually over 80C…my hands sweat when using this thing….brought it into the mac store yesterday and they said it was normal. There is no way that this is normal…i am hoping someone can help with this….i also bought the iLap product and it did not really help with the temperature, it just allowed me to work with the computer on my lap.

  21. Bilge said: Sun, 9 September 2007 at 22:13

    Hi,

    Overheating I guess is a common problem of all new laptops. It was the first thing noticed at my MBP. only solution I found was higher fan rpm using SMC fan control. trough all the year fan speeds are set to 3000 rpm but at sumer I notced even thats not enough and using 4500 rpm right now and the heat is 46C. it is loud but better than hot laptop. But my problem is with using windows on my mac. any one can show me a way to speed up my fans while running windows…

  22. Mark F. said: Sun, 23 September 2007 at 01:15

    Could it be the famous thermal paste problem? Google “mac thermal paste” (no quotes). You’ll find a ton of posts on the subject.

  23. Mark F. said: Sun, 23 September 2007 at 01:17

    PS: If that’s the problem, a good cleaning and a little Arctic Silver should fix it.

  24. Chris said: Sun, 7 October 2007 at 20:19

    I have windows 2004 installed and VMware fusion. My MB periodically gets hot and whenever this happens I run “top” in terminal and find a process called “Microsoft” running that consumes 100% of CPU power. I can “kill” that process and the fan immediately starts to wind down, the processor usage drops and everything returns to normal. I have no idea what the process is, nothing stops working in MS Office 2004. It’s a severe pain in the ass!

    Anybody got any idea what that process might be and how to stop it?

  25. Abbey said: Wed, 24 October 2007 at 12:43

    I had an overheating problem that started a few weeks ago, I thought one of the fans might have gone bad so I ran smcFanControl and sure enough one was stuck at 0 rpm. Then it occurred to me I’ve had this machine for a little while and there is very little interior ventilation and dust build-up could easily create heat-pockets and/or clog a fan. so I grabbed some canned air and(making sure to bend the nozzle so as to prevent frosty spray) blew out the 2 fan vents. Now both of the fans are humming along and my MBP is back down to 54-65C, rather that 65-80C. Hope that helps.

  26. Andrew said: Sun, 28 October 2007 at 02:25

    I finally decided to give mac ago after always using windows machines. It runs hot, sometimes stinky, and I now have a DVD stuck that is still trying to get out every minute or so because mac is so stupid that it continues with impossible tasks ratehr than stops. ( I am a bit peed off). It sounds completely mechanical. Hard to find a warranty guy in Vietnam.

  27. James said: Mon, 5 November 2007 at 10:03

    Thanks Ryan for stating the obvious about checking activity monitor I could have sworn that I had already done that, obviously not, or I would have noticed 4 instances of folding-at-home all running, They were constantly maxing out the processors, now I understand that that’s the idea of distributed software to use the redundant clock cycles, and all for a very worthwhile cause but my fans were running at close to 6000rpm ( I’m surprised they go that fast ) and the processor was at 100%. usage at 85deg

    Maybe there was just an error with my install, I’ll look into it later as I still want to help them out, but not at the expense of a MBPro….

    Within 2 mins of killing the apps the temp dropped 30deg.

    Thanks for everybody’s helpful contributions.

  28. Brett said: Wed, 23 January 2008 at 07:08

    I have been having this problem for the last few days now. I have had smc fan control for months now, and it usually cools my MBP very nicely. THe last few days though, even at the highest fan speed, the MBP is running steady at 140*F! Before this week, I could have the fans on a only a moderate speed and maintain the temps below that. WTF! I dont recall any recent updates, and my CPU usage is below 10% now, and still my min temp is 140*F, and when not running at supersonic fan speed, the temps are skyrocketing to 175*F! Anyone figure out the problem?

  29. Brett said: Wed, 23 January 2008 at 07:10

    ok, nevermind that last comment. there was a process i wasnt seeing taking up alot of processor. force quit, problem solved :-D

  30. T Bizzle Jr said: Tue, 19 February 2008 at 15:25

    I’ve been having a serious temperature problem for the last week, CPU was getting up to 75 degrees celcius with nothing open!
    I opened Activity monitor to check things out but found nothing unusual.
    I didn’t notice anything unusal because it was set to “My processes”
    I changed that to “All processes” and found that I had Print Job Manager open and that was consuming 50% of CPU usage…
    Once I shut that down, the temp slowly went back to normal operating temperature.

  31. Ryan said: Fri, 21 March 2008 at 05:18

    My main problem is that I can’t seem to get my min fan speed settings with smc to stick. I’ll make changes and hit save- fan speed immediately accelerates then almost as quickly goes back down to 1500rpm. It’s pissing me off because I think I’ve linked overheating to the reason why Frozen Throne keeps taking me off bnet and freezing up (when it is running CPU A goes over 70C and Graphics processor diode is closer to 80C). Any thoughts?

  32. Andy said: Tue, 29 April 2008 at 07:27

    Thanks for the advice Ryan, i changed the activity monitor to show all processes and my HP print manager was eating almost 50%. I killed the process and my temp dropped almost instantly and still falling - My battery indicator also went from 55 min to 2:40 instantly.

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