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2013 Mac Pro Thermal Problem?

Max853
By Max853
in Laptops and Pre-Built Systems
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Hello Everyone! I did a repair on a late 2013 15 inch retina mac pro with an i7 and 8gb of ram. With this I repasted the CPU, and from the minor testing I did before it seems to see improvement. The problem I have is the temps it gets up to. I was watching a 1080p video on youtube with messages open and apple music. The fan was kind of loud and it appeared the cpu reached about 82 C. Is this normal? Thanks!

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@Max853 82C on a 2013 mobile CPU when doing light multitasking seems a bit too high. Are you sure there was no like system maintenance or stuff going on in the background? If not, which thermal paste did you use?

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4 minutes ago, Max853 said:

Hello Everyone! I did a repair on a late 2013 15 inch retina mac pro with an i7 and 8gb of ram. With this I repasted the CPU, and from the minor testing I did before it seems to see improvement. The problem I have is the temps it gets up to. I was watching a 1080p video on youtube with messages open and apple music. The fan was kind of loud and it appeared the cpu reached about 82 C. Is this normal? Thanks!

Apple devices in general will allow the temperatures to get higher to minimize fan speed, since it'll affect the 'user experience'. 82C sounds on the low end for when Apple usually decides the fans should start doing something, but 2013 is before the later years of Intel Macs where Apple seemingly fired all its engineers who knew anything about thermodynamics.

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6 minutes ago, Max853 said:

Hello Everyone! I did a repair on a late 2013 15 inch retina mac pro with an i7 and 8gb of ram. With this I repasted the CPU, and from the minor testing I did before it seems to see improvement. The problem I have is the temps it gets up to. I was watching a 1080p video on youtube with messages open and apple music. The fan was kind of loud and it appeared the cpu reached about 82 C. Is this normal? Thanks!

I'm not super familiar with these MacBooks but I do recall that somewhere around this year of mac's just kind had bad thermal design in the first place. I could be wrong though? I'm not a Mac guy at all.

please tag me for a response, It's really hard to keep tabs on every thread I reply to. thanks!!

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13 minutes ago, Dillpickle23422 said:

I'm not super familiar with these MacBooks but I do recall that somewhere around this year of mac's just kind had bad thermal design in the first place. I could be wrong though? I'm not a Mac guy at all.

2015 is typically regarded as the last "good" model of MBP. Running in the 80s seems a little high for that workload, especially where the fan was audible. If the fan wasn't audible then I'd probably call it normal.

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You can use a tool like smcFanControl to get a little more aggressive with the fan curve. That should help temps, but (horror of horrors) the fan will be more audible.

 

https://github.com/hholtmann/smcFanControl

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2 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

2015 is typically regarded as the last "good" model of MBP. Running in the 80s seems a little high for that workload, especially where the fan was audible. If the fan wasn't audible then I'd probably call it normal.

Yep, unless the fans are going absolutely crazy for no reason, it's fine. My 13" unibody MBP (2012) regularly sat in the 80s, my 15" retina MBP (2015) ran 99C flat under anything harder than downloading a file, fans didn't go silly mode unless it was sustained heavy load. I should say runs, not ran though, as my siblings have the 2012 and a coworker has the 2015 still (it was a work computer, not my personal machine) and both are still kicking. Folks get overly worried about Mac temps, but in my experience they've always ran within Intel spec. Said spec allows the chips to get up to 100C flat which scares people, but it's perfectly fine for a stock Intel chip. The only Mac I've had that wouldn't hop into the 80s or higher immediately was my 2007 Mac Pro, that would sit in the 60s-70s thanks to massive tower coolers. And my M1 MacBook Air now (also a work machine), it doesn't get very hot unless pushed with sustained loads, which I don't really do. 

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thank you all for the help. The thing thats weird to me is im currently editing a video in preimere and like typing this in another tab and like....its fine. I barely hear anything. it looks like my temps as of right now are at about 73 C.

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