MacBook Air - HDMI out causes excessive heat/fan issues, DVI is fine

I recently bought my first mac computer, a MacBook Air 13". It has been a wonderful machine up to the point I tried to connect it to an external monitor.

I bought a Moshi HDMI adapter and while I had no problem connecting, I noticed that just by being connected the MBA would start heating up at the location of the CPU. This happens regardless of connecting to my monitor, HDTV, or my buddies HDTV. I also bought a DVI adapter, and that has no problems with heating up.

I did some googling and found some others had a similar problem, so I thought I'd start a thread to see what people have to say.

Thanks for reading my first post!

i noticed that today.

Ive had my 11" Macbook Air for about 2 months now, and ive connected it to my 50" tv a few times with the same HDMI converter. I never noticed any problem before, except for maybe a little noise from the fan. I got a 60" plasma today and tried to use it as the display, and after about 10 minutes i noticed that the fan was crazy loud, and when i picked it up the bottom was really warm... Uuncomfortably warm. Granted, the macbook air was plugged in to the charger, and i have the Incipio Feather case on it.

I don't know for sure, but it's possible when connecting the MBA to a large screen TV or display through HDMI it causes the graphics adapter to work that much harder. You have to remember that the Air uses an Intel HD 3000 GPU which borrows memory from the system. The most system memory an Air can have installed is 4 GB which means the GPU can only borrow 384 MB.

However, many folks are using their MBA with an Apple Cinema Display or other monitor and don't seem to be having any problems with heat.