Cooling a MacBook Pro with smcFanControl
A few months ago a friend recommended smcFanControl, and I've been cool ever since. Cool as in temperature, not cool as in Mark Shuttleworth.
Macs are awesome, of course. This goes without saying. But it also goes without saying that you can fry eggs on the MacBook Pros (and the Powerbook G4s before them). I have third-degree burns from long blogging sessions.
Enter smcFanControl. It's a super-simple but powerful GPL program that allows you to take control of your MacBook Pro's fan. By default the RPMs won't exceed 3,000, but you can tweak this to go much higher. While I tend to not use the program on flights, where I want to preserve battery life, I use it religiously at home/work when I don't want my Mac to be the dominant source of heat in my home (though we are considering saving on heating costs by switching from natural gas to MacBook Pro.
Should you be worried about damaging your Mac? After all, doesn't Apple know best, and shouldn't it, exclusively, mess with your fan settings? Maybe. But the greater problem that I see--burning out your Mac, not your fan--is impossible with smcFanControl because it won't let you set the fan speed below (or above, for that matter) what Apple recommends.
In other words, you stay cool, and your Mac doesn't fry. I'll buy that (except, of course, I don't have to--it's free as in price and as in freedom).
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
By running the fan at 6000rpms instead of 2000rpms, I'm getting a 25 degree (F) drop in temperature. Makes all the difference in a house without air conditioning in the summer!
--Jason Nassi
http://www.pcsilenzioso.it/forum/showthread.php?t=6281
http://www.pcsilenzioso.it/forum/showthread.php?t=6281
- by cesare.pedrini1 February 9, 2009 5:59 AM PST
- I put some more pictures of my job on my website.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)You can visit it at
http://nemo.xtreemhost.com/CesarePedrini-Portfolio/Macbook_Pro_Cooling_solution/Macbook_Pro_Cooling_solution.html
Enjoy