7 Oct
2011
7 Oct
'11
9:59 a.m.
On 10/7/2011 4:08 AM, Ray Arachelian wrote:
On 10/07/2011 01:34 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
I'd add one extra "fold" :). The fan controller(s) in the first Macbook
Pro were set to almost *never* turn them on. The fans ran at extremely
low speeds even when the machine was baking your pants to your legs. I
picture this as another case of Jobs' "ideals vs. engineering" (see
also: Apple III, G4 Cube) -- "This thing needs to be silent!" At any
rate, it only took a few months for some hackers to build a tool you
could use to manually throttle the fans. After goosing them up by about
25% the machine became much cooler. (And it was still pretty quiet.)
(Incidentally, I did attempt replacing the thermal compound on my unit
about three weeks after buying it. That was nerve-wracking, I don't
usually like to void warranties on $2k items that I've just bought.
Replacing the thermal compound didn't end up making much of a difference
for me.)
- Josh
Depends on the model, I suppose. Back when the
original MacBook Pro
was introduced I was in the market for a decent laptop and the MacBook
fit the bill. It looked damned sexy, had a ton of horsepower and
seemed pretty durable.
It was indeed a very nice looking and very fast laptop but I was never
actually able to use it on my *lap* for very long -- it ran
*extremely* hot under anything more taxing than idle. The metal area
between the keyboard and the screen would get almost too hot to touch
under moderate loads and the underside was scorching hot as well. My
understanding is that this was a common complaint with this particular
model.
I have one of those. The problem is two fold. First, the heatsink is
on the bottom of the laptop - it's a big huge pair of copper pipes that
touch the CPU, GPU and northbridge and connect them to the bottom of the
case and the two blower fans, so heat mostly goes to the bottom. Of
course, hot air rises, so it escapes through the vent between the
display and the keyboard, and some comes out of the keyboard.
The 2nd problem is that these models were the ones that had thermal
compound put on them with a trowel, which cooked these poor beasts.
See:
http://blog.johnkutlu.com/search/label/thermal%20paste and
https://discussions.apple.com/message/12223482?messageID=12223482#12223482?…
These, which have ATI GPUs, and a few later nVidia models develp issues
with their GPUs due to the heat. The issue is supposedly that they get
so hot that the BGA connectors start to have their solder melt and show
display artifacts.
The extra heat tends to cook other things such as batteries and hard
drives too.