MBP 13' (Mid-2010) Boot camp overheating during gaming?

I'm new to this boot camp thing as well as the boards, so please bear with me.

I've recently installed WinXP on Bootcamp in order to play Mass Effect 2. I've read (and noticed) how hot can MBP get so I downloaded smcfancontrol to blast my fan full speed (i had no idea my mac has only one fan that I can adjust). I downloaded like three different utilities to see which one can monitor my temperatures best and ever since everyone recommended different ones, I tried several. The problem is, that they all show different levels. What is 60 celsius on one is 75 on other. I know that this is a common question but what is a safe temperature when I can't really even tell what temperature I should be watching (some particular utility that I don't know of?) ? I don't really feel like my MBP is overheating but what do I know? Sometimes utilities indicate temperatures over 80, once even 92.

Can anyone help me? Or am I simply looking into this too much?

cynicalandbored said:

Or am I simply looking into this too much?

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That.

Your fans are thermostatically controlled... or at least they were, until you started messing around with smcFanControl.

If the machine was actually overheating, it would turn off. It's running hot - and modern computers do that when they're under load.

The best thing you can do is to put it on a hard, flat surface when gaming so that the underbody is not being insulated (by your lap) and it can breathe as it was designed to.

Thanks, that calmed me a bit.

So if I restart the system, smcFanControl should no longer control my fans?

My MBP, now 55 months old, has so many 4-8 hour gaming sessions running in excess of 90C that I couldn't even hazard a guess as to what that number might be. And it's still going strong.

Best advice I can give is forget you ever heard of those fan control thingamajigs, play your game and be happy. If you're going to play with it sitting on your lap, get yourself a laptop stand to put it on, unless you want to block the air flow and enjoy having semi-permanent red marks on the top of your legs.

One last thing, this fan controlling thing... is it Windows / OSX that controls the fans or is it hardware-based?

cynicalandbored said:

One last thing, this fan controlling thing... is it Windows / OSX that controls the fans or is it hardware-based?

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It's hardware-based (i.e. the SMC, or systems management controller handles the function).

SMCFanControl simply intercedes and tells the SMC not to manage the fan speeds itself.

Thank you very much, both of you My mind is at rest now.

So far, the game crashed twice, as in audio stutter and I had to shut it down by force. I would love to blame some drivers but this sort of looks like an overheating issue. Ah well, back to Chess.

cynicalandbored said:

So far, the game crashed twice, as in audio stutter and I had to shut it down by force. I would love to blame some drivers but this sort of looks like an overheating issue. Ah well, back to Chess.

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If it was overheating, the entire machine would shut down and turn off. You've just got a poorly running game. Have you tried updating the video drivers yet? How about running Apple Software Update from the Start Menu (within Windows).

cwa107 said:

If it was overheating, the entire machine would shut down and turn off. You've just got a poorly running game. Have you tried updating the video drivers yet? How about running Apple Software Update from the Start Menu (within Windows).

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Apple Software Update finds only Safari, iTunes and Quicktime, nothing else. And if I have looked correctly at nVidia's official site, my drivers should be up to date since I ran their test on my hardware. I even patched the game to it's latest but it just happens. Never at a particular moment in the game though.

cynicalandbored said:

Apple Software Update finds only Safari, iTunes and Quicktime, nothing else. And if I have looked correctly at nVidia's official site, my drivers should be up to date since I ran their test on my hardware. I even patched the game to it's latest but it just happens. Never at a particular moment in the game though.

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Apple doesn't usually keep the drivers as up to date as NVIDIA does. Just because the hardware test passed, doesn't mean that the driver is up-to-date. I would download the latest package for your card and install it and see where that leaves you.