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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Intel Mac Fan Controllers and Temperature Guages
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This weekend in Bay Area Software Symposium I showed several people the temperature guage I use on my Mac Book Pro and everyone wanted the link. Then Slashdot had this article on the smcFanControl, which was immediately picked up and blogged about by everyone.
I'm not sure which I like better. Fan Control adjusts your fan speed based on the temperature and that's great. But it has bounds on the upper and lower temperatures that are that aren't low enough and too high, respectively. The whole point of using another fan control is to control the fans myself. :)
The smcFanControl is just a straight RPM setting for your fan. My MBP has traditionally been so quiet that I've never heard the fans. In fact, I doubted they were even running! I've seen temps in the 190 degree range (Farenheit, not Celcius!) and that's way to hot for a would-be laptop computer.
I now know that I never heard my fans because they seemed to be stuck at a measly 1,000 rpms. I now have my fans set at 3,000 rpms and I can barely hear them in a quiet room, but my CPU temperatures are very reasonable. At this moment, I'm looking at 82.4 F and 71.6 F for the two cores and I've been on the computer for an hour. It'll get much higher after a while, but at 3,000 rpms, I haven't seen it pass 130 F yet.
Lastly, I'm using a program called Temperature Monitor to keep an eye on heat. It shows me the temperature of each CPU core and the disk. It's got tons of views and graphs as well.
What would I change? The Temperature Monitor should have a pop-up alarm if the heat gets too high. Then I wouldn't have to keep an eye on the window. The Fan Control should give me broader ranges for my high and low temperature boundaries. And the smcFanControl... if they expand it, tie the speed to the temperature of the cores, like Fan Control does.
All the programs here are free by the way, so these comments are offered as constructive criticims, not complaints. :) I really appreciate being in a community where tools like this available.
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