06-13-2009, 09:06 PM

Hi guys:
First and foremost, though this is my first post in this forum, I have been a long time lurker, and found many helpful bits of advice on this forum. Keep up the good work!


Anyway, so here goes: I have a WhiteBook, and I was looking around on here, for some fan apps, I'm an average college student, and don't really use CPU intensive programs, my activities are limited to internet browsing, word processing, watching/burning movies, iTunes, and the like.
I had read that SMC Fan Control was a great app for controlling my fan speeds etc. Some people praise it, and some say its not needed at all. I had gone ahead and installed it, and now I'm thinking whether or not it was wise to do so. When I'm at home, my temp is between 40-45 C, if I'm running YouTube, or watching a movie, it'll jump to around 60-70 C. But I notice that my fan speed doesnt change..it stays at that constant 2000 RPM.
So I was wondering if my fan speed will change at all, or does SMC have it set at that one speed, no matter what the temp is. Because if the case is the latter, well that is definitely a problem for me.

So bottom line, should I keep SMC? or just get rid of it?

06-13-2009, 09:56 PM

Those of us use to building and O/C'g our own high end gaming systems; we'd put a fan in the front of the case to pull in cool air and blow across the hard drives to keep them cool, add in another at the rear and maybe even the side or top to blow out the hot air; get the latest Zalman to put on the CPU instead of the stock heatsink/fan, another for the northbridge. Then get a fan controller mounted in the top drive bay that monitors temps and gives full control of all the fans to squeeze that last fraction of speed from your video card and processor.

So some of us when we got our first Mac, well, we decided we needed that control on our notebook also. I did too. As if we knew better than the engineers. We don't. Get rid of it.

For all those others out there considering putting fan control on your MB, MB Pro or iMac - my advice is to let the machine control the fan speeds per the engineers specifications. They've studied, know the minimum and maximum working temps of the CPU. They know when it can run at minimum and when it needs to be ramped up to maintain safe operating temps. Leave it alone, unless you "know" what you are doing.

06-13-2009, 10:21 PM

Thanks for the advice!

So I can just delete the program by just dragging it to the trash right?

On another note, should I have a program that monitors the temp for the system? or would that be going overboard?

06-13-2009, 10:51 PM

Yeah, I installed one of those also. Used iStat Pro for almost 2 years and then Temperature Monitor for awhile. Finally decided it was pointless. Never did anything for two years with the info it provides. It doesn't have anything that's really needed that OS X's own Activity Monitor doesn't have.

I have found no really valid reason for monitoring fan speed or temps on my machine. Every time I notice the fans ramp up, there's been a reason. Most of the time it's because I'm doing some video intensive work. Sometimes it's an errant program with a memory leak. In that case, simply quit the offending app.

06-13-2009, 10:57 PM

Alright, so I uninstalled SMC

One quick thing, I have iStat running, and its showing the fans running at 2000 RPM, which was the default that I had SMC run the fans at, does this mean the the program is still there? or does the comp just run the fans at that speed now?

And sorry if these are newb questions, I just want to take care of my mac, and have it last me a while.

06-13-2009, 11:13 PM

2000 is the approx default fan speed - at least for mine - it will vary between about 1980-2100 most of the time at the low end and up to 6200 when it needs it.

06-13-2009, 11:49 PM

Okay, sounds good, what should the running temperature be? For normal use, I hover around 38-45 C, when I use YouTube, or watch movies and stuff, it can get up to around 65 C, is that normal?