MacBook issues, it just gets too hot.

After a while I decided to put Vista on the thing, I had a spare key and I wanted to use a few programs and play games on it. Installation was fine, everything works.

However, it runs much hotter than in OSX. I know all about the ****ty drivers Apple wrote for Vista and the not so good power management. And I'm OK with a little heat, but the problem here is that I think it gets a little too hot, even in simple games. I installed Duke Nukém 3D today, applied the high-res pack and all that then decided to play. It was smooth as butter at first, but then it started to lag a little. I thought it was normal, that the coed wasn't optimized or something. However, then I started noticing a pattern... The lag starts after a few minutes, shortly after the fan spins up to 6200RPM and the case starts to feel hot right above the F6 key. I can't check temperatures in Windows, Everest only tells me how hot the GPU is. (70c.)

I noticed the same pattern on my old HP laptop, it started lagging in games after a while, and when I titled the laptop a little to allow more air to pass through it the lag suddenly stopped. I put it down again, and the lag came back shortly thereafter.

This is a huge problem, and it makes me a very disappointed customer. I keep thinking "Maybe I should just sell it, get an equal or better laptop for the money", but considering I JUST got the thing I don't want to give up yet.

So what am I supposed to do there? Live with it? I think not. If it's this bad with a mere 2.0ghz C2D inside I really don't want to know what it would be like to have a 2.4ghz C2D, or a MacBook Pro.

 

I have been gaming on my MBP for a while. I play Call of Duty 5, Grand theft auto, and Farcry 2. Although it does get very hot, I never experienced any lag.

You may want to update the drivers for the video card. But, I think that it could be Vista itself. Vista requires more power than XP. I game on XP.

2 GB for Vista + gaming is really cutting it close and that could be the reason. I would upgrade the RAM to 4 gb and see if that solves it. THe GPU temperature is fine. It was made to go all the way to 100 degrees I think.

 

Hmyeah, there's one thing I should try... Going back to the Boot-Camp drivers. I actually installed drivers from Laptop2Go the other day so maybe they're the culprit here.

As for Vista, I feel that 2GB is fine for now. The GFX card takes some of that but I haven't run into any problems yet.

 

2GB should be fine of light games in Vista, I ran supreme commander on my old Turion X2 2.0Ghz, X1600. Vista Ult. 2GB 667mhz ram. and ram wasn't an issue, (GPU and CPU were).

 

I've got a 2.9 in my mbp and with fans turned on with smcfancontrol my cpu temps don't get above mid 50's so far.

You can monitor your gpu, HD, and both cores with speedfan in vista. You can also add a gadget called quad/dual core usage that offers a decent looking monitor.

 

Thanks for telling me about Speedfan, didn't know that it worked on a Mac. So the temps I get while gaming are 80 degrees celsius on the GPU, and about 85 on the CPU. I've never seen temps above those, so I guess that's as hot as it gets. However, this time it didn't lag. Maybe it was a problem with the drivers.. I dunno. The lag did come back after a while, but the temps were in the mid 70s at the time so I doubt it's got anything to do with the temperature.

Problem solved I guess. No need to worry. Yay.

 

it is normal to be hot due to the slim profile of macbook(pro) as a consequence it can only fit in a small fan.

 

Out of curiosity what are normal operating temperatures for the previous generation macbook pros? I've got CPU temperatures between 60 and 70 when I'm using it for more than 20 minutes, plus my fan doesn't really seem to kick in. The graphics processor is 75. I've started wondering if my fan is broken, because it's so hot that it's uncomfortable to have the laptop on my lap. Are there any ways (undervolting?) to lower cpu temps? I don't even game on it and it's pretty damn hot!

I've got 2.5 ghz, 4gb ram, 8600 GT, and 5400 rpm 250 gb hard drive if that makes any difference.

 

Some people will set the fans to spin at a higher rpm in OSX with SMC fan control before they boot into Windows to try to keep temperatures lower. I'm not sure if there is a better solution now (I haven't used a native Windows install on my MBP in quite some time). 70 degrees isn't too hot for a GPU and it shouldn't be throttling down. When gaming, also make sure that your MB is on a hard flat surface (for best ventilation).

 

i try to keep it under 60, above that i get nervous. fan speed @ around 3000 most of the time now.

 

Na.. It's probably the faulty Windows driver from Apple that's causing the overheating since OSX appear to have the overheating issue under control.

 

mine would go >90 w/out having anything reason, under control is an overstatement.

and consider how much trouble mb/p have w/ bootcamp windows, it sounds like the fault is on apple's side.

ps. i still don't have windows installed yet.

 

That's highly unlikely.. are you sure that's 90F not 90C? 90F is awesome idle temperature(pretty hard to achieve).

Most people's MBP/MB runs around 40-60C at idle on OSX.
Running at above 90C is almost impossible because of the following:
1) The processor would trottle itself at 90 degrees thus degrading performance by a lot
2) The maximum TJMax is 90C for intel processor

 

hi CanadianDude,

Would you like to share your temps while gaming with us?

mine: gpu@76-80(rarely 83 but not higher)

To all of you, i've learnt my lesson with vista. Now everytime i bootcamp, i set my fans to max on smc fan control. I now see temps of 51-53c while surfing on the net on vista.

 

I don't know exactly what the temps are, I don't measure them. All I know is that I also set my fans to the max in OSX before I boot into windows. Even still, the computer gets very hot, but not to the point where it's uncomfortable to touch.

 

huh?It gets hot even when you don't game? Mine doesn't. When a few dozen tabs are opened and i'm watching videos on youtube, it goes up to 58c but never more when my fans are set to max. It gets hot only when gaming.

 

The Unibodies run very cool compared to previous Apple notebooks. I really strongly suggest you put 4 GB in your mac because everything will run so much better. It's dirt cheap these days. Anyway I have a 15" Unibody MBP and even when the fans have been howling for awhile, which only happens playing games, it does not get very hot. The regular MacBook like yours may be different though.

 

Apple really does need to update their boot camp drivers especially since they make Boot Camp a selling point. But my experience is that Vista has very high battery usage and temperatures on any laptop. Probably due to Vista's poor processor, memory and disk I/O

 

Both Xp 32 and Vista 32 can only recognize 3 gigs of ram right? Does bootcamp now support Windows xp and vista 64 bit now?

 

Yes Boot Camp works with 64-bit Vista. Have not tried 64-bit XP since hardly anyone used it.

 

i am from canada and never agree with the F measurement , it did throttled to 4-6k rpm (90 for <1min) and stay at 85 until i reboot my computer; during those time i shut down everything but nothing help.

and you can't really blame windows when apple doesn't optimize their drivers for windows(on mac) since windows don't create any of the hardware and with the similar/same spec system they are fine on other make. let's not discuss why people want windows on mac; it's silly to even be bothered.

unless

 

Vista's battery life on laptop is usually better than XP(before modding) or MacOSX (hackintosh). Vista preloads your program into ram so less battery would be wasted on accessing the hdd. The power management is also more optimized thus improving battery life.

There's issues with bootcamp and bootcamp driver thus causing vista to have very high battery usssage, high temperature and substandard power management features.

 

Apple has much better power management under OSX then other PC vendors do under Windows. In comparison to Apple, I would hardly call Vista's power management "optimized." Although Apple does have the huge advantage of being able to tweak their power management software to a very limited set of hardware.

 

I'm talking about the OS not the laptop itself. Out of 3 OSs (OSX, Vista and XP) on the same computer Vista is the better at power management.

BTW.. where did you get these charts? Their values seems to be exaggerated a bit.

 

I got the chart from a notebook review by Anandtech. If Vista is better at power management, why are the Apple laptops getting twice the battery life per mwh even though they have more power hungry parts (such as a more powerful GPU and larger screens compared to the ultra portables that come closest in the chart)?

 

Assuming you got your charg from here:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3439&p=13

The results are not really fair just like the article says. Also... the article seems to compare the hardware instead of the OSes not about OSX vs Vista in power efficiency. It's about Macbook vs other laptop in power efficiencies or should I say "power efficiencyness with different specs".

Anyways.. on Anandtech, they've done some test with macbook air with Vista and OSX. The result concluded that OSX doubles the battery life. I've also done my own tests as well with Windows Vista compared to OSX (hackintosh) and the results are opposite. Windows Vista is much more efficient than Mac OSX.

There might be problem with apple's drivers..etc which cause the power saving features not working properly. There might also be Mac driver issue in hackintosh that might have caused power saving features not working correctly. Just like that anandtech article said, it's impossible to determine the actual power efficiencies of Vista vs OSX without the help of Microsoft and Apple.

Also..nobody has done test on a netbook with lithium ion cells (which all other laptop used on the anandtech article). Li-po cells have highier energy density and also "last longer" than regular li-ion cells with the same power rating. That might have also caused some inaccuracies in the test.

What Anandtech should've done is, remove the battery, hook up a "killawatt" to measure the power ussage directly instead of measuring the battery life. Even then, the tests wouldn't be really fair since they're not using the exact same hardware and there might be driver compatibilities issue which prevents power saving features from running perfectly.

BTW.. What's the average "internet surfing" battery life on your macbook?
I'm getting about 7.1 minutes/Whr on my netbook. 6.5 hours of internet browsing with 55W li-ion cell. My netbook is one of those inefficient ones (acer aspire one)

 

I typically get a little over 4 hours on my MBP. 5 hours is easily attainable If I dimm my screen and am doing light work (like word processing). As for the chart, the main variable separating the Apple notebooks from the others is that they are running OSX and not Vista. It's not like Apple uses special batteries or is using different hardware that is super energy efficient. Here is a link the the review I pulled the graph from.

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3540&p=10

note the author's comments

In another review, this topic is specifically addressed.

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3435&p=13

In short, the numbers show that OSX power management is quite a bit better than Vista power management.

 

Macs do use special battery or use "different lithium chemistry). Macs use lithium polymer batteries and regular laptops use li-ion (type 18650 to be specific). Li-ion offers cheaper price but at a price of soft of higher internal resistance (what determines the usable battery life), bulky and potentially explosive..etc

Assuming bootcamp has perfectly written power management drivers for Vista, then Anandtech's article would be right. But in many situations, that's not the case.

Anyways.. the Mac's hardware is definetly more "power efficient" than the laptops anandtech have tested. But there's almost no way to know for sure that Vista is using more power than OSX.

 

Believe what you want but there are tons PC notebooks with hardware specs almost identical to the MacBooks but none of them come even close to the Macbook and MBP battery life. Conversely, when running Vista, Macbooks also lose about half their battery life. Under what basis are you claiming that Vista has better power management then OSX? Just what different variables are you seeing that account for the huge differences in battery life between the different machines running different OS's.

 

I've done battery test on my netbook with both XP, Vista, and OSX. All 3 operating system gives me around 6 hours of battery life, but Vista gives me about 10 minutes more than both XP and OSX.

The strange part about the benchmark on a Mac with OSX and Vista is that the power ussage difference is outrageous.
Power ussage is 90% dependant on the hardware you use. If under the same condition where 2 operating system both use the same "power saving features" with the cpu, gpu, hdd..etc load, the power consumption should be the same. That's not the case when running Vista on a Mac. If an OS fails to use the power saving features, then the power ussage will sky rocket and increase a lot. The failure of an OS to use the power saving features is likely due to the improperly written driver.

BTW for users with both Vista and OSX, what are your battery life on your Macbook when you turn off all of the power saving features. Is the battery life similar to running windows Vista in bootcamp?

BTW.. just looking around for similar equipped laptop.
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4574
seems to be getting 8.4minutes per watt hour according to the review, that's about 33% more power efficient than apple's hardware and at the same time running windows Vista. If Vista is truely 1/2 as power efficient as OSX, Vista running on dell E6400 should be 266% more power efficient than running on Macbook.

 

No no, this is only when gaming.

When not gaming, i don't turn the fans up. It gets a tad warmer like you say but it doesn't get VERY hot when not gaming.

 

As far as I know some laptops from Lenovo give you much more than just 6 (Like the T400 with a 9-cell, gives you almost 10 hours in the right conditions.) hours of battery, and they use XP/Vista. But of course they weren't on that list there. Also, Apple only works with a limited set of hardware, so I just assume that it's easier for them to optimize the power-management.

Everyone knows the drivers in Boot Camp suck, they can't even get the freaking touch-pad right for Gods sake! I can't right-click with it at all, so I have to hook up a mouse every time I want to tweak a few things and whatnot. Click-dragging is a pain to use too.

 

clicking and dragging work just fine for me... you can click and hold the "button" down with 1 finger (or I use my thumb), then drag with another finger, you don't have to try to hold it down and drag all with the same finger. Also right click works in most windows installations if you use 3 fingers to click...

 

but hey, people love to bash windows instead of apple for the poor drivers
i even bet apple purposely create poor drivers to suck more battery life on windows, but that's just a conspiracy(reasonable one)

 

why are we not seeing some higher end thinkpad/toshiba/sony/fujitsu who are known for their product line w/ good battery life?

we have all those dell, hp, ALIENWARE!!! for god sake.
and btw, last time i check some of those windows-based laptops are <1000. where as macbook/pro are all much pricier (we can also leave alienware there since they are expensive for no reason w/ x3100).

this chart is way too lousy to even be brought up even though we all would agree that apple models have longer battery life on usage w/out going in depth.

furthermore on the battery comparison from jackulous, i've also heard about li-poly would sustain its capacity for longer than li-ion but their lifespan are shorter(for similar reason why SE mobile phones have 8hours of talk time when others have only 4)

 

I can click and drag, I know how to do it. But there's a noticeable delay between the second click, and when you're able to drag things around. The pointer gets stuck for about a second before it moves. It's annoying.

 

ask for replacement.

thinpads yes,but others have dismal battery life!

some of those are direct competitors to apples notebooks.And AW has both 8800gtx and x3100

 

Also.. The chart is quite flawed. They're comparing a Mac with running at max power saving while letting windows run at normal power settings. Also..most of the computer there have CCFL backlit screen vs the LED backlit screen. That alone will be more than 10-15% power ussage difference.

 

Apple does need to improve their Boot Camp drivers but here is a newsflash.....Vista sucks battery life on PC laptops too. Not only because of poor power management but because of the nature of the OS. It has poor cpu and memory efficiency compared to OS X or Linux for that mater and is not nearly as consistent as a result. It's the same as a car stopping and starting vs one that is running at consistent speed. Thats what you get with poorly optimized code layered upon years of legacy code much of which does nothing except consume resources and cause instability.

 

toshiba's R series aren't bad
panasonic's toughbook are decent, somewhat better than thinkpad even but price is at a higher premium than even apples

if the chart is to show how american companies design than windows notebook vs. mac's notebook; i would totally agree with the chart. face it, companies who make notebook in american are cost driven: lower the better. it only shows how some companies can make(design shouldn't be used for some products) a notebook it is in a similar fashion in the auto industry; they make things by definition.

for them, notebook = mobile computer = a flipping piece with keyboard, screen, and every other component underneath.

i don't against this approach, but if you are comparing against apple, have something similar to it?

ps. hp imo had improved the most in design but i am not seeing any integration between design and performance necessarily to be competitive, yet. dell is working on it. and i can only wonder if this is a cultural thing? american likes everything bigger?

 

those don't account for 1hour difference in battery life though, doesn't it? if apple advertise boot camp as a selling point don't they have an obligation to optimize to its fullest other than MS? windows don't advertise the capability to run on mac and it is much easier given the limited parts being put in by apple on their mac/book/pro/air as well does it?

as we finally have a full version vista(windows7); we can only look forward to the next overhaul from MS to improve on things like those, maybe a notebook dedicated version? who know

it is apple to orange to compare other windows notebooks too cuz only a few that uses lithium polymer, they suck under cold weather but does offer a higher capacity compare to lithium ion

 

What's your proof for "poor power management" and the "nature of the OS". Vista uses the same power mangement features as OSX and I'm not sure what you meant by "nature of the OS. 95% of the time, the efficiency are determined by the hardware itself and the hardware power saving features enabled, the the OS.

When comparing Vista vs OSX on a Macbook, you'll see that OSX will double the battery life. But on other computer besides a Mac, running OSX vs Windows barely make any difference.

From a pure technological point of view, the cpu management should be the same in both OSX and Windows. The ram management system in Vista is actually superior to OSX.

With your example.. here's how I believe it's suppose to be.
OSX: A car starts, take a long trip, stop, goes back and start again multiple times. When OSX needs data, it gets it from the HDD.
Vista: A big truck, fully loaded, start, then stop at warehouse to offload data. When Vista needs the data, it gets it from the warehouse instead of taking very long trips back and forth for many time.
With Vista, you'll waste less fuel and time when you're processing a multiple files.

Let's not talk about the codes of the OS as you don't know anything about it thus you can't comment on it.

From many years of experience running linux(fedore core, red hat, ubuntu, kubuntu, knoppix..etc), Windows, OSX...the OS makes very little difference in the power consumption and the actual performance of the computer if all variables are equal. If all the power saving features are used on a laptop, different OS will have similar battery run time unless its hardware ussage pattern is radically different. On experiments that I've done using OSX, Linux and Windows, my netbook offers about the same amount of battery run time (~10minutes difference) with Vista at the top. The reason why Vista is at the top is probably because of my ussage patterns. All of my programs and OS are almost all preloaded into the ram. Some cache files are on a SD card for quick access without the need to spin up the hdd.

 

The hackery require to get OSX to run on non Apple hardware is not a variable at all . Atom, Core 2 Duo, their power management must be identical. It doesn't matter that various OS X builds must trick the OS into thinking the CPU is actually a Core 2! I wonder why many 'hackintoshes' can't wake up from sleep. Must just be a tiny bug. But your netbook test is an absolute infallible apples to apples (oranges to oranges?) test. How dare anyone challenge your opinion. You are the computer expert here right? We all know that we can't trust those professional reviewers at all! Its common knowledge that Apple pays these reviewers off.

(just a hint, but trying to test OS X power management performance on unsupported hardware just might encounter some issues that might just have a strong influence on the test outcome. )

Are you trying to claim that OS X doesn't take advantage of caching?

 

atom couldn't run osx? you seem to contradicted your opinion already here

 

My point is that an Atom is not a Core 2 even if you tell the OS it is. When there is a large discrepancy between the system hardware and the OS interpretation of this hardware (or what the OS was coded to run on), I find it very plausible that this will have a very strong influence on power management. Although Apple Bootcamp drivers are far from perfect, at least Apple hardware supports running Windows (with professionally coded drivers). I find it reasonable to claim that testing Windows power management on a Mac installed via Bootcamp (although not perfect) holds much more relevance then testing OS X power management with an "illegal" copy of OSX86 on a netbook.

 

So.. from your point of view..
You're generalizing that Vista is about 2x less power efficient as OSX. That means runnning Vista on Macbook according to the benchmark is 266% less efficient than a similar equipped Dell e6400. 3 minutes per Whr for Vista on Mac vs 8 minutes for Dell e6400.

Anyways.. all I am saying is that the comparison on Aanandtech wasn't comparing the battery life between OSX and Vista. There was another article on Anandtech that compared Vista with OSX, but the result was that Vista is half as power efficient as OSX. There's obviously some unknown issues with the benchmark just like the reviewer on Anandtech said.

Also.. when I tested Vista, XP and OSX, i didn't enable any power saving features (not guarenteed since some power saving features are hardware based). All OSes got around the same battery run time. Tricking OSX into a core2duo processor won't magically raise the power used by the netbook by 100% to twice as much as Vista. Though, you can take my test as a grain of salt since I didn't repeat the experiment many times to get an absolutely accurate battery run time value.

My point is that the you should take the anandtech battery runtime tests as a grain of salt for couple obvious reasons. With the results from the anandtech review, the charts does not necessarily reflect that OSX is truely twice as energy efficient as Windows. That's only true on a Mac probably because those "professionally written" drivers for power managment features on Vista was faulty or not working 100%. On tests done with non-mac computer, results of battery run time are more believable that OSX and Vista are more or less the same. I'm just stating another side of story to your biased point of view.

BTW.. has anybody done a battery test on a Mac with all power mangement disabled? Are you getting around the same battery run time in both Windows Vista and OSX.

If someone can proove that OSX run time are about the same as Windows Vista with no power saving features turned on, then that will suggest Windows Vista is not 100% compatible with Macs due to whatever reason. That also suggest that OSX and Vista are about as the same when it comes down to power mangement.

 

Well that pretty much nullifies your test. How can you draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of power management software if you purposely disabled them for the test?

 

I was comparing which OS is more power efficient. If I enable things such as speedstep and voltage adjustments, Vista and XP will be twice as efficient as OSX because OSX doesn't natively support intel Atom processor.

 

Use Windows XP or Windows 7. You know Vista is chewing too many of your system resources (CPU and RAM), making the system work harder.
MBP do run hot, but Vista will make it explode because it is such a poorly optimized operating system.

 

i wonder if anyone had installed a fresh windows (xp/vista/7) before and compare it to boot camp and see if there is any difference in temperature/battery life...

that might give us an idea how good/bad the bootcamp supplied drivers are?

i mean... before all those windows bashing without controlling all variables. but yes, windows 7 should be what vista was.