Hot Keyboard

[rsherid]

The keyboard on my Late 2013 MacBook gets hot within a half hour of watching a movie on it. SmcControl shows temps at 40 degrees celsius, but trust me: It gets hot to the touch. The heat seems to be radiating right beneath the keyboard. Would cleaning dust out of the fans do anything to fix this? They haven’t gone off yet.

 

[MacInWin]

Videos drive the CPU/GPU really, really hard, so the temps go up. 40C is hot to the touch, so that's consistent with what you reported. Does smccontrol show the fan speeds? Are you using it to override Apple's default fan controls? The default fan speeds are regulated to optimize what Apple thinks temps should be. At 40C, they should be running pretty hard unless you took manual control with SMCControl somehow.

As to dust, it never hurts to remove dust from the fans periodically.

 

[iggibar]

Cleaning dust, assuming there is dust, SHOULD help dissipate heat away from the CPU & GPU. Question is, how are you going to go about doing this? Unless you are going to open it and pull the fan out(pretty easy task), I wouldn't even bother.

 

[techiesteve]

I find light dust doesn't cause noticeable issues, but fluff does. It can build up as a semi solid layer around 4mm thick between rear of a fan and the heatsink. Carefully remove the fans to check and remove if present.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

40C isn't high enough of a temp to cause everything to get hot. Unless you were having issues with the fans not kicking in at the right time and right speed, you DON'T want to use SMCFanControl to force the fan at a particular rate all the time. The fans should vary based on heat and that will also allow them to function for a longer period of time.

My MBP under normal usage sits around 60C and the keyboard area is warm and definitely not hot. But as Jake mentioned, watching videos, playing games all use the CPU and GPU and that will definitely spike the temps, and I would've thought way higher than 40C.

 

[badshoehabit]

40C isn't high enough of a temp to cause everything to get hot. Unless you were having issues with the fans not kicking in at the right time and right speed, you DON'T want to use SMCFanControl to force the fan at a particular rate all the time. The fans should vary based on heat and that will also allow them to function for a longer period of time.

My MBP under normal usage sits around 60C and the keyboard area is warm and definitely not hot. But as Jake mentioned, watching videos, playing games all use the CPU and GPU and that will definitely spike the temps, and I would've thought way higher than 40C.

Are you not confusing C with F? 60c is Death Valley hot (140F)!

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Sue, yeah the temp at ambient is very hot and indeed if I were to touch the CPU at 40C, it'd hurt. However, within the confines of the laptop with the heatsink and other heat dissipating technologies, it's manageable.

 

[dtravis7]

Ashwin is correct. Even my Windows gaming rig with very large fans gets up to 40c just doing minor things. The case stays very cool. That 40c is the cpu core.

 

[pm-r]

Are you not confusing C with F? 60c is Death Valley hot (140F)!

I was wondering the same sort of thing with a discussion of 40C being referred to as HOT.

My gosh, that's only three degrees Celsius above Normal human body temperature of 37C.



- Patrick
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[pm-r]

Sue, yeah the temp at ambient is very hot and indeed if I were to touch the CPU at 40C, it'd hurt. However, within the confines of the laptop with the heatsink and other heat dissipating technologies, it's manageable.

Ashwin, I'm assuming that you're joking right. That an object at 40 degrees Celsius is really hot and it would hurt to touch...???

Give me a break if you were serious, but maybe that's why the US hasn't and won't change over to using the Celsius temperature scale.

Put your hand on your own wrist which should be about 37 degrees Celsius at the most.


- Patrick
======

 

[chscag]

Put your hand on your own wrist which should be about 37 degrees Celsius at the most.

LOL, Patrick. You would have to stick your finger in your ear or at the back of your tongue to measure 37 degrees C. Of course as hot as it is today here in Fort Worth, all I have to do is stick my hand out the window!

 

[MacInWin]

My MBP pretty much cruises along at idle with temps in the 60 degree Celsius range. The case just above the keyboard, in the warmest spot, is about 37C in the same range. To the touch, it's warm, but not hot. After all, it's only about 3C above my fingertip temp (Yes, I have a sensing thermometer that I used to measure.)

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Ashwin, I'm assuming that you're joking right. That an object at 40 degrees Celsius is really hot and it would hurt to touch...???

Give me a break if you were serious, but maybe that's why the US hasn't and won't change over to using the Celsius temperature scale.

Put your hand on your own wrist which should be about 37 degrees Celsius at the most.


- Patrick
======

Patrick, yes that was a little bit of a cheeky response.

 

[Rod]

It would be great if this topic could be definitively resolved but the truth is there is not a "one size fits all answer" to rsherid's question.

What I can say is that in a general sense the industry says; "if you have an Intel processor (like my MBPr) a CPU Core temperature of 40-45 degrees Celsius while idling and/or a temperature of over 80-85 degrees Celsius under full load may be cause for concern".

But this is a general guideline and there are differences between CPU temp tolerances of 5 degrees Celsius just between different processors in the same model MBP.

Anecdotally I have a 2015 MBP with MFC installed and set on Auto. The fan speed range is between 1299-6199 RPM, at 45 degrees Celsius (idling) the fan does not come on at all (Menu bar icon shows zero RPM).
From my observation the Menu Bar display is based on CPU Proximity rather than one core or another (on Auto).

The temp goes up and down between 45-50 degrees Celsius without initiating the fan at all but if the temperature is sustained the fan comes on.
If I am running a video converter or a CPU intensive game it is not unusual for the temp to reach 80-85 degrees Celsius and stay there but the fan still does not reach maximum rpm.

I have been using MFC for over 5 years on three different Mac books so I'm fairly confident that it works and I have never had a Mac Book fail on me at all other than hard drive failure due to age and/or data corruption or in one case a keyboard failure on a new device leading to device replacement and that is the device I'm using now.

So I can say fairly confidently that a 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU running in a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) at ambient temperatures of about 25-30 degrees Celsius (under a ceiling fan) is happy to run at temperatures of 45-85 degrees Celsius and higher (for short intervals).

I have only a few times seen the fan speed approach 5000 rpm and it is quite audible at that point and quickly drops as does the temp.

Its likely that the idle temp would be lower if the ambient temp was too but I suspect it would soon rise to about 45 deg on use.

Always remember that Mac's have built in protection that will shut the device down if it gets too hot.

N.B. It's important to note that MFC fan speeds are different for different devices, models and processors, eg AMD processors generally have tolerances around 5 degrees Celsius lower than Intel.