MacBook Air 2017 Casual/Occasional Gaming

Hello!!

I recently bought a MacBook Air, 13 inch, 2017 model. I am very pleased with this laptop, it is very fast and it surpassed all of my expectations. I am not a gamer by any means, buy I like to play a few games from time to time, but I noticed that the laptop gets very hot and the fans run like crazy, regardless of the game I play. I am not talking about games like Skyrim, and other killers like that, but I was just wondering if running some casual games like Hearthstone, or Stardew Valley will do any harm to the laptop on the long run. Again, I didn´t bought this laptop for games, but it would be a shame if you couldn´t kill some time on it without worrying that you might damage it.
Thank you for your time, and have a good day!!

Welcome to our forums.

Your 13" 2017 MacBook Air has an integrated graphics chipset (an Intel HD 6000) which shares up to 1.5GB of memory from the main machine memory. Games almost always task the CPU and GPU fairly hard. It's not unusual for the fan to ramp up when playing a game as the machine begins to work harder. However, during the course of normal computing such as browsing the internet or editing a document, the fan should be almost silent. In other words, it will run at a much lower RPM.

What I suggest is to download a free temperature and fan monitoring program so that you can keep an eye on both. I recommend the free Macs Fan Control as it puts itself in your top menu bar and shows both fan speed and CPU temperature. The application also allows for adjusting the fan speed, however, I DO NOT recommend you try to adjust fans speeds. Just use the program as a monitor. Leave the fan at its default.

If you find things are out of whack with your new MacBook Air, you have Apple Care for one year and 90 days of free telephone support. I also highly recommend you buy Apple Care Plus for your new MacBook Air.

Thank you for the advice!!