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Paxz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 6, 2007
8
0
Hi. I'm interested in purchasing one of the new SR MBP, but I'm very picky about operating temperatures. Call me crazy, but I actually want a laptop I can put on my lap. Could someone be so kind as to post their SMCFancontrol temperatures while running on battery power. If possible, I would like numbers under casual web browsing, word processing, etc. and under load conditions such as video editing, gaming, or running code. Thank you in advance for any input.
 
Currently at 36°C on a ~20°C day, running on battery power. Airport on, Safari w/ eleven tabs, GranParadiso idling in the dock, Adium, my Cisco VPN client & a telnet session running. It's about the same ambient temperature I've had all week and the MBP has hovered around the mid-thirties; so I get these temps constantly. Fans are at 2300rpm through SMC.

As a comparison, I had it charging last night and opened up six .avi's in Quicktime, ten tabs in Safari and GranParadiso, Apeture, Adium, iTunes & Seashore and it peaked at around 75°C. It was obviously not on my lap, but i wasn't scalding to touch on the base either.
 
Haha funny. Definitely, if you are really worried about running a hot laptop on your laptop, just make sure to run up the fan speeds. I literally run the MBP on my laptop on my bare legs (I have my shorts on) at times and its just warm, but not scalding. I never had the laptop be too uncomfortably hot. I wouldn't know about it when playing a game, since I usually have it on the desk when I do, or when doing anything intensive, since I do not have the patience to have a laptop sit there when its doing something which does not require me to input anything.
 
Thank you for the great feedback.

I am very encourage by the mid-30 C temperatures with "regular" usage. My girlfriend owns a MBP C2D and it's operating temperature with similar usage is ~49 C, and this is after setting the fan to max RPMS (6000). Frankly, I find that unacceptable. If I run the laptop on the default fan settings, the temperature jumps to ~58 C.

Running the fans at max really isn't an acceptable solution. Not only does it waste precious battery power, but it's noisy. Yes, I am a bit picky, but it's a 2-3 grand laptop ... so yeah ... perfection would be nice :)

More feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
 
My MBP SR idles at around 50-54C. The fans are not very responsive. I was playing Unreal at the highest settings and did not hear the fans come on once. When I stopped the game I saw the temperature had reached 83C. Under load, I have seen the temperature up to 89C, the highest on any laptop I have ever owned.

My previous MBP C2D would start the fans at 70C and the temperature rarely stayed above the mid sixties.

When surfing, the base gets a tad too warm to keep on my legs. Ambient temperature here in the UK at the moment is in the mid twenties C and quite humid.


Waiting for a firmware update. Will try SMC Fancontrol in the meantime.
 
@weckart

I highly recommend SMCFancontrol, to adjust the aggressiveness of your laptop's fan. It isn't ideal, but it works okay. I usually set the fans to max rpms before launching a game, such as WoW, because 89 C is definitely not healthy for your laptop. If I recall, I usually get mid-70s while running WoW or other cpu (gpu) intensive applications.
 
As of right now when I am typing this post, the laptop is on my legs and the measured temperature right now for the enclosure bottom is 95 degree F, which is about 35 degrees C. The fans are running at the default speed, 1000 RPM for my MBP, with the energy savings on Better Battery Life. Running Camino, Mail, Adium, and iTunes. Hope that this information is useful to you.

Yes, I understand that running full speed on battery is kind of dumb, defeats the whole purpose of trying to make your battery run longer.
 
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