Any experience here with Coolbook to undervolt CPU??

My MBP has been running rather warm of late and so after some research I narrowed in on Coolbook to help undervolt the CPU as part of my attempt to cool things down. My MBP has a 2.66GHz C2D CPU and has bee running around 75C when I have a number of apps going incl. Safari, Lightroom, iTerm, iStat Menus, Candybar, smcFanControl, Little Snitch, SAV, Growl, Outlook 2011, Parallels running Win7...

My questions for you guys are:

1. Have any of you used Coolbook and if so how did you stability test each voltage?
2. If someone has the same CPU as I do and is using Coolbook, could you post a screenshot of you voltages?
3. Are there any other good ways, software or hardware to get the temps a little lower?

Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!!

 

Bump! No responses? No one uses Coolbook?

 

Can't bring myself to pay for it... doesn't seem needed. I had a bad taste in my mouth ever since years ago i used the "free trial" version which didn't really do anything but was acting like it was... without informing you that is was just "pretending" ... I say pretending because all it did was claim I was running 10º cooler, when other temp programs were not reading that difference.

Unless I could try it out for free for real and see what it really does... I cannot bring myself to pay for it.

 

good to know. I thought, for $10 i'd give it a whirl and see if it helped. thanks for the heads up.

 

1) CB has a builtin tool for throttling the CPU to 100% usage.
2) Its not really advisable to do that as every chip has different voltage tolerances. Stable voltages for one CPU may bring another one to its knees. Just start at the default voltages and work your way down while keeping the CPU at 100% usage for 2-3 hours.
3) I'm not aware of any other software solutions. You can take the laptop to Apple for cleaning if its under warranty, or you can clean it yourself with a vacuum cleaner and a canister of compressed air.

 

I made a thread about this a day or two ago. I coolbooked my new 13" MBA Ultimate and got a very good increase in battery life. Its a 2.13ghz model so the highest clock speed was paired with .093V no problem. I did extensive testing using CPUtest too and it was stable. Battery life is much better and heat with CPUtest shows it running at 10-15 degree Celsius less.

CPUtest with a Huge, 10 repetitions, 2 instances got me up to 85-86 normally and loud fan noise. After Coolbook it hits about 75 or less. I never used to hear the fan anyway so i never really had a heat issue. I did it for the battery life. totally worth the $10.

I did notice it got a LITTLE less snappy and the scrolling got a little choppy but honestly its so minute that i really think im imagining it or if it happened, it could be due to the Coolbook or the fact that my SSD is 80% full with crap.
Either way, I'm running way lower voltage than stock and very stabile so a +1 here.

You need to test your own CPU. it's easy to do. Using the "set" button basically means "test". It doesn't save it. If you set it and then run CPUtest and its stabile, that pair is good to go.

Clean your fans after you open it up. If it has dust, it WILL get hot as a mofo.

Optimize your OSX and get rid of junk files.

 

Since I got my MBP running stable using Coolbook, I thought I'd post my voltages in case anyone was interested. It is for a 5,3 Macbook Pro with a 2.66GHz CPU.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/app...ervolting-mba-13-ultimate-so-worth-money.html

 

i saw the thread earlier when kettlecorn mentioned it. The point of my last post was simply to follow up and conclude the research, not to ask for more assistance.

Thanks

 

I actually ran into some curious problems in using CB that convinced me to uninstall it from my computer. Not only did temperatures go UP, but boot time also increased significantly, presumably because the Mac OS kernel had to load the new Coolbook module. Just keep an eye out for these problems.

 

Thanks for the heads up Bog. I will definitely keep an eye out for those telltale signs that something's afoot My temps seem to be down for now and the machine runs at about the same speed so all's well for now...

 

Hey!

Just got CB a couple days ago and got my voltages down quite a bit too. Looking at a lower temp averaging 10 degrees and about 30-45 mins of extra battery life. I'd recommend it. If you do have stability issues, then you've went too far and need to ramp up the voltages a couple steps. Haven't noticed any negative aspects to doing this.

-Geby.