Temperature Monitoring & program to load CPU?

So, two questions... I borrowed my grandmother's mbp for my little brother to do a school project on. While I've got it here I'd like to do a couple things with it. If it goes well I'll go ahead and pick up my birthday present tomorrow (looking at the 17" high res/matte screen MBP with the 7.2k drive in it...).

So, two things:
I need a program that will monitor things like CPU temperature and stuff like that. I've been using hmonitor but I don't know if that's the best program to use or not. Secondly, I need something that's equivalent to say, Prime95 or CPUBurn on a PC-a program that serves no function other than to pile data onto the processor until the poor thing's eyes bug out. (goal being to see just how hot this thing will get when it's running flat out)

Any tips?

Perhaps iStat for temp.

As far as the system testing, there is a threshold temperature in which the components inside a computer can operate under. Once that threshold has been exceeded, the computer will no longer function until the temperature is at the adequate levels. Wouldn't it be easier to find out this maximum threshold temperature in which the MBP operates under?

I'll look into iStat, thanks.

And no, knowing the maximum temperature spec won't do me any good. I have a very good idea of what it is (max. spec for the CPU should be 100*C, very similar for the chipset, GPU is going to be at least 100, probably closer to 120 or higher given that that's what it is on some nVidia desktop parts). That tells me nothing.

Prolonged operation at say, 85 or 90*C, while technically within spec, will result in premature failure of something or other on the board. If not a major chip something like a resistor or a capacitor or an oscillator. And really, it doesn't matter whether the CPU fails or the 100μF capacitor at location C103 packs it in, because either way you're gonna end up with a dead board.

While your taking a look at iStat and don't like the widget solution I suggest taking a look at istat menu also. It's by the same developer only difference you can access the information in the menubar.

kuchiki

I tried to download and use iStat menu. It downloads and says it is installed successfully. When it opens into the system prefs, it says that pane can't open and that i should contact the software company for a newer version. How do I fix it?

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I was having some kind of DNS issues or something last night because I couldn't get the istat site to pull up. *shrug*

Regardless, I ended up using chess (computer v. computer, maximum difficulty- takes a good 5 minutes to think between moves) and cinebench to load it up as much as I could-since I couldn't get any WUs from F@H either-and I ended up using Temperature Monitor for monitoring it.

Very interesting results. The base of my grandmother's 2.16 doesn't get completely absurdly hot like all the other MBPs I've used does. CPU cores get up to about 85*C then the fan kicks up a notch and they drop back down to about 78-80.

What I did find that was interesting is that the heatpipe temp is significantly lower than the CPU temp (this is a very bad thing) and the temperature takes FOREVER to come back down after the load is removed. To get back down to 40*C it took almost an hour.

Thundermoon1994 said:

I tried to download and use iStat menu. It downloads and says it is installed successfully. When it opens into the system prefs, it says that pane can't open and that i should contact the software company for a newer version. How do I fix it?

Click to expand...

I honestly don't know what might be the problem there...maybe you just drop a line to the developer?

I figured it out. I already had istat pro widget installed and during install, it would ask me if I wanted to update my prefs pane. All I had to do was say no and now it works.

Two things that will reliably peg my CPUs:

iCal sometimes insists on running a background 'SyncServer' which promptly takes up 99% of the CPU.

Download Checkpoint Secure's VPN software for the Mac. It'll install, require a reboot, and then proceed to take up 100% of your CPU. It does work for what it is supposed to do, but the fan wail makes me not want to use it. That's what VMs running Windows is for. I uninstalled it.