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MacBook Pro heating unreasonably
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yaront
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Joined: 18 Jan 2012
Posts: 16

PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2012 6:12 am    Post subject: MacBook Pro heating unreasonably Reply with quote

I have a late 2011 MBP, and even though top shows almost no CPU usage and powertop claims that all 4 cores are in deep sleep ~99% of the time, I still get a LOT of heat, which in turn causes the fan to be noisy, and quite frankly it drives me crazy. :?
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing the heat? There's no hybrid graphics setup, just an Intel integrated GPU.
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ppurka
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Joined: 26 Dec 2004
Posts: 3256

PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2012 8:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a laptop from Lenovo whose fan is always screaming. Software wise I found that one of the culprits was the lightning plugin of thunderbird (maybe even the provider for google plugin I use). It wakes up every few minutes and eats up 100% cpu for a good 30-40s. The idle temperature hovers around 70C most of the time.

Hardware wise, I have a discrete GPU and I always thought it was the GPU to blame, because only one single part of the laptop gets _hot_ (and I do mean hot!). Opening up the laptop one day, I realized that what was on that end of the laptop was only the RAM, and the GPU was on the other side which remains cool.

So, for me, those are the two reasons. And I am none the happier in finding the reasons since I don't know a fix to either of them. Maybe you can start investigating by looking at your cpu monitor, and by looking at the layout of your laptop to find out which component is situated where, and which region of the notebook gets warm. I am pretty sure you might be able to get a layout of your machine online, without needing to open it.
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cazort
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Joined: 19 Sep 2004
Posts: 343
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2012 2:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I like ppurka's advice about feeling on the Laptop for where the heat is being generated; it may be some component that you did not expect!

Different hardware is different, and some of it naturally runs hotter than others, but if your system is very hot, with the fan on full with near zero CPU usage, that would be a cause for concern for me. Especially if the processor is hot.

Some thoughts that came to mind, if you compiled your own kernel, it could be that there are some bad kernel options which are causing your hardware to not be managing heat properly (or some related issue, like CPU sleep settings, CPU frequency scaling, or the like). If you dual boot another OS, you could look at whether this problem happens in another OS. If not, try burning a liveCD or liveDVD and seeing if you have the problem. If not, then it's probably a kernel problem and I'd go over the power-related options. If it's the same problem in any OS or with any kernel, then it may just be the way your hardware is built.

You can look up specs for your hardware if you want to put your mind at ease with respect to heat-induced damage to the processors or other sensitive components. But I would look into it--if you are doing anything that is consistently generating more heat than normal, it can cause your hardware to wear out faster than normal.
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jopeto
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Joined: 02 Jul 2012
Posts: 106

PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2012 10:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I had a similar problem and maybe you have already done so, but you can try compiling acpi_cpufreq into the kernel, and make the cpufreq_ondemand governor the default
Code:
-> Power management and ACPI options                                                                                                                                                                   
          -> CPU Frequency scaling                                                                                                                                                                           
           -> CPU Frequency scaling (CPU_FREQ [=y])

as suggested in this post:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-928796-highlight-.html
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