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Macbook Air overheating results in 1.2 GHz CPU

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fuzzielitlpanda

macrumors 6502a
Mar 24, 2008
834
0
hey guys could you help me interpret my results? from what i see, i'm not having the problem with a drop in speed even under extreme temperatures. did i luck out? i have both coolbook and smc installed to control the cpu voltage, frequency, and fan speed. in coolbook, i have set it so that when my mba is on the adapter, it is running at 1600mhz all the time. if you guys are having trouble with the frequency drop, maybe coolbook is a possible solution.

overheatingresults.jpg
 
S

stakis

macrumors member
Oct 25, 2007
94
0
fuzzielitlpanda said:
hey guys could you help me interpret my results? from what i see, i'm not having the problem with a drop in speed even under extreme temperatures. did i luck out? i have both coolbook and smc installed to control the cpu voltage, frequency, and fan speed. in coolbook, i have set it so that when my mba is on the adapter, it is running at 1600mhz all the time. if you guys are having trouble with the frequency drop, maybe coolbook is a possible solution.
Click to expand...

Thats what I was saying... when you disable coolbook you get this issue, but with coolbook active, you get full advantage of the CPU...

looks like coolbook's throttling does a much better job in making this processor work the way it's supposed to...
 
P

pr5owner

macrumors 65816
Jun 10, 2007
1,016
0
Sesshi said:
Oh come on guys. Why the surprise / disappointment?

It's a 21st Century Apple. Smoke & mirrors. Style, Compromise and Marketing over Engineering and Function. Seriously, what do you expect? For it to run reliably like a price-comparable Sony? Lenovo? ...Dell?
Click to expand...

ARE you serious? you ACCEPT the fact that it wont run reliably because it looks good? thats rediculous! all computers should theoretically be 100% reliable if their CPU is at 100%, time should not make a diffrence because the heatsink and fan paired with the CPU should be able to dissipate MORE than the cpu can generate,

if not then its defective.
 
M

MayaTlab

macrumors 6502
Dec 12, 2007
320
302
ARE you serious? you ACCEPT the fact that it wont run reliably because it looks good? thats rediculous! all computers should theoretically be 100% reliable if their CPU is at 100%, time should not make a diffrence because the heatsink and fan paired with the CPU should be able to dissipate MORE than the cpu can generate,
Click to expand...

I cannot step into Sesshi's shoes, but I imagine this was ironic :).
 
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fuzzielitlpanda

macrumors 6502a
Mar 24, 2008
834
0
alphaod said:
I had to ask is why you guys are writing the yes to a file? That kills your hard drive.
Click to expand...

how so? i just did what another user did. i have no idea what the command does , but i run the 'yes' command only when i want to put my cpu at full load to check temperatures
 
csubear

csubear

macrumors 6502a
Aug 22, 2003
613
0
alphaod said:
I had to ask is why you guys are writing the yes to a file? That kills your hard drive.
Click to expand...

/dev/null isn't really a file. When read it produces zeros, and when written does nothing. So really what happening is they are writing the output of yes to the file system driver which is discarding the data. In fact most everything in /dev aren't real files, they are all devices of some type.
 
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wharrad

macrumors newbie
Aug 26, 2008
3
0
Long time lurker... I just signed up to dismiss this car analogy people seem to be using, it's simply incorrect.

The top speed of a car and the rated speed of a processor are different.

The top speed of a processor is always above what Intel put on the tin... And actually the 1.6 and the 1.8 CPUs came off the same factory line, with the same parts and design. The reason they have a different speed is actually what Intel states the processor should run at all of the time - with the 1.8 chips being 'blessed'.

The top speed of these processors are much higher, probably closer to the 3.4 or so you can easily get from a desktop part. Intel test the CPU before stamping them to decide what speed they can run at constantly and sell it as that.

To better explain this... The 1.6 is what the CPU should be capable of running at, with full load for it's design life (10 years or so). The 'top speed' of a processor is actually what people can get out of the CPU by upping the FSB etc (overclocking). Now if you run your processor at above the rated speed, then yes, expect hiccups.

If car manufacturers were forced to put speeds or revs their engines can handle constantly, they wouldn't be so high as they currently are. In fact, I'll say a comfortable cruising speed for my car is 70 MPH, anything higher - up to and including the top speed of 120MPH - would be 'overclocking' the car and I can expect something to go wrong.



Now I am slightly annoyed as I didn't pay this much for a 1.2Ghz laptop, this one is not capable of 1.6 for more than 5 seconds (just shy of the 10 years Intel rate the CPU to).

I'm also slightly annoyed after paying so much cash, the only real solution seems to be a 'hack' which costs extra and will make the system less stable.


To those who ask 'who needs the extra power'. Well, maybe you don't, and that's excellent news for you. Unfortunately many of us picked the model that fits our requirements. My particular problem is that although I needed portability for simple work tasks, I also enjoy watching movies in my spare time. I went as far as finding a same spec laptop to make sure my h.264 encodes worked at this level. Thanks to this issue, they don't. I don't want the hassle of re-encoding my new blue-ray collection to make up for Apple's false advertising.

I put up with the other compromises, as I was fully aware of them when I purchased the laptop. I think it's a great laptop - if you need more ports and an optical drive then you want a desktop replacement. However, now I understand my inability to now play videos is a hardware problem and that sale of a 1.6 laptop is in fact a lie. The rating of 1.6 means constant use, not just the odd blip at that speed.


As for those which state it's normal to throttle down a CPU - yes it is, but only when you're not using it. It's a nice bi-product that it cools things down, but it's purpose is to save battery when idling. As soon as you want to use your CPU, it should throttle up to the maximum and stay there until it's done. Thermal protection (the original core shut-down issue) is the only technology which should be used to help prevent drastic overheating, and laptops MUST be designed so this is a very rare event (or you do something stupid like fold in bed).


Unfortunately, I think this is a manufacturing defect... Only Apple with a product recall can effectively address.
 
T

ttpjd1

macrumors newbie
May 12, 2008
6
0
Thankyou, wharrad

... for finally putting that particular nonesense to bed!

As an automotive engineer attemping to run simulations of cars on a MacBook Air, I couldn't help but feel somewhat infuriated by the irony of being told in such a patronising manner that to expect to be able to run such simulations on my MBA was analogous to mistreating a car by continuously red-lining it. What codswallop!

Like you, wharrad, I remain very annoyed with the situation.

FYI, I am not sure if your post was in response to the Apple software update, which has at least (for me) resolved the issue of cores shutting down. By that time, I had already bought Coolbook, which, provided I limited my CPU to 1.2GHz and allowed it to drop to 800MHz from time to time, had also 'solved' the problem. I put 'solved' in quote marks because like yourself, I wasn't aware that I'd bought a machine capable of running only at 800MHz at the very time I need the speed.

I haven't paid full attention to what the Apple software update has done yet (and I admit that in general use the machine feels pretty much 'OK' now) but if that fix is indeed just reducing the speed of the CPU in heavy load conditions, I really think that is not acceptable. Misrepresentation, for sure. I will be running some benchmarks to compare the performance of my "1.6GHz" MBA with my 2.0GHz Mac mini and then I will decide where to go from there...

Happy to share contact details with anyone interested in pursuing this matter as a group.

I'm particularly interested to try to understand whether we just got 'dud' (early?) machines, or whether all MBAs exhibit this problem when given any serious work to do. (And yes, I mean 'serious' work, not just playing random videos from YouTube, as seems to be the highest level of 'power use' imaginable by some users on this forum)!

Also, for the record, I'm no Apple-basher. I've been writing software for Apple machines since 1983 (owned Apple II+, //e, IIGS, Lisa 2, Mac 128, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Mac LC, Mac IIfix, PowerBook Duos, Mac Quadra 800, Power Mac 8600, Power Mac G3, iBook, Aluminium PowerBook, Newton OMP and 2000, iPhone 3G... sure I missed some) - anyway, thus far, I have never bought a non-Apple computer in my life.

All the best,


Phil
 
F

Franz1234

macrumors newbie
Aug 30, 2008
15
0
Hey, I'm very new to this forum. I read trough a lot of threads regarding the Macbook Air and tried a lot to reduce the issue by myself. Currently I'm running Coolbook and applied my own Thermal Paste. I'm very unhappy with this situation. The Macbook Air is a great Laptop which totally fits my needs. Previously I owned 2 Macbooks and 1 Macbook Pro. Never had any problems with an Apple Computer before but this one is driving me crazy.

>Simple Flash Animations bring the Laptop to overheating.
>CPU Temperature reaches 105 Degrees under 6200 RPM Fan.
>Fan goes up to MAX even under low temperature.
>low graphic performance.. even my old Macbook would have performed better
and and and... You all know the problems.

I discovered something while applying the Thermal Paste. I put a little bit more because I read that it won't exactly be enough to jut put a thin layer. I assembled everything back and then I was curious how the Thermal Paste would fit in now. I uploaded a picture. It shows perfectly how bad the *cooling unit* is assembled. Remember... I put paste... assembled it and put it into part again. I didn't expect that there is so less contact.

See yourself : http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/396/dsc02252ng3.jpg
 
L

lenselijer

macrumors member
Sep 3, 2008
41
4
First I had the core shutdowns so i removed all white goo from the heatsink and applied a good drop of arctic silver 5.

Now my CPU gets to 75C and it's stuck at 1.2ghz.

I run a 1080p movie in windows xp bootcamp with coreavc codec so it fully uses the 2 cores, but the fan is at maximum speed, it's very annoying when watching a movie :(

Any solution would be helpful, because i dont think replacing the mba will do any good.
 
aleni

aleni

macrumors 68030
Jun 2, 2006
2,583
909
it's funny. i think the throttling is making the slow down.

i have it locked at 800mhz,

and while typing this message , i'm running 2 instances of yes > /dev/null, newsfire open, mail open, vmware fusion, and activity monitor open with 2 cores fully working loaded, i even try top cmd+space and type itunes, open up itunes and then try to view the visualizer . no lag at all.

i think for the time being, it's better to be locked at 800mhz rather than make the cpu throttling up and down from 800 to 1600/1800mhz.

when i'm watching youtube, it's just fine with 800mhz locked. better than 1600mhz and then trottling down to 800mhz and makes the video unwatchable. i'm pretty confused too here, it's the same 800mhz but the locked 800mhz gets a better performance.

my final assumption is the throttling down process makes the OS unusable.
 
F

Franz1234

macrumors newbie
Aug 30, 2008
15
0
Having it looked at 800MHz will significantly decrease the performance. You might not realize that but when u'll try to encode video or format music or maybe play a game the difference between 1600Mhz and 800Mhz decides on whether it's playable or not. For me the throttling up and down works pretty good. Now I'm selling my MBA trough to get one of the new MBP or maybe even a MB.
 
mhnajjar

mhnajjar

macrumors 6502a
Mar 3, 2008
777
0
I just installed the MSR Tools you provided and I have Safari with three tabs open, MSN & Yahoo messengers and my MBA1 1.6/80 is showing 0.8 GHZ and 87C in iStat Pro :eek: What would happen if I ran the code in the Terminal :mad:.

Does MBA2 suffer from this? I might upgrade :eek: not according to NC MacGuy for the mean time.
 
daneoni

daneoni

macrumors G4
Mar 24, 2006
11,833
1,565
mhnajjar said:
I just installed the MSR Tools you provided and I have Safari with three tabs open, MSN & Yahoo messengers and my MBA1 1.6/80 is showing 0.8 GHZ and 87C in iStat Pro :eek: What would happen if I ran the code in the Terminal :mad:.

Does MBA2 suffer from this? I might upgrade :eek:
Click to expand...

The processor will never remain at it full clockspeed...this is normal its called throttling. The problem comes when the max speed is capped off i.e. if you're running an intensive program the processor should throttle up to its max speed 1.6 in your case or 1.8 in the SSD model not 1.2 which Apple capped it to
 
NC MacGuy

NC MacGuy

macrumors 603
Feb 9, 2005
6,233
0
The good side of the grass.
mhnajjar said:
I just installed the MSR Tools you provided and I have Safari with three tabs open, MSN & Yahoo messengers and my MBA1 1.6/80 is showing 0.8 GHZ and 87C in iStat Pro :eek: What would happen if I ran the code in the Terminal :mad:.

Does MBA2 suffer from this? I might upgrade :eek:
Click to expand...

So I guess this is pretty good?:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/6546183/

Three movies concurrently, photobooth, Word, Safari, ... I don't know - lots of stuff open and playing. Not bad.
 
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