This may not solve everyones issues with heat but it sure did the trick for me. After months of seeing my battery usage plummet in an hour and a half and the temperature of my MBPro circa early 2008, I finally found the solution.

Sure these things run insane processor speeds and yes metal does conduct heat nicely to your thighs, but if the fan is going into overdrive and the eggs in your ovaries have just been poached, then check the CPU processor speed. It has likely been hijacked by a program this is “stuck”. Yes, technical term I know.

Anyhow, here is the link. Nice and easy to follow and as I said; I am now back to 4+ hours of battery life and my loins are now waiting to be roasted in other ways.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473

Perhaps, just perhaps, these other things are contributing to the high case temperatures.

Crazy thought.

I hate that I cant sit on my lounge and use my MBP because of the heat, but aside from all that, its without a doubt the best OS/computer combination I have ever used – and I used to virtually hate the things.

The heat sucks, be nice if they addressed this as a priority!

Tried the smcFanControl and it actually works! From 160 degrees F to 130 within 10 minutes.
Fan is not too noisy at 4000rpm but a bit loud at 6000rpm.
Still a bit warmer than my IBM ThinkPad but at least I do not have burn my lap.

I wonder if a software fix is even possible with the earlier MBPs, or if it’s strictly a hardware issue.

At any rate, this article reminded me of the iStat pro widget, for which I am grateful! (woot)

Best of luck to all of those who venture into fixing the heat themselves.

The newer MBP have the heat issue resolved, a friend of mine has one and the difference is amazing. The thing barely gets hot.

I’ve NEVER had issues with the typing surface becoming uncomfortable. The bottom only becomes hot when I have the laptop sitting on a surface that insulates the heat (basically any sort of fabric), instead of a smooth, flat surface.

There are either some anomalies in MBP manufacturing quality out there, or people are being unreasonable with their expectations.

All my problems were solved by installing smcfancontrol. I just keep an eye on the temps, and whenever it gets too warm, I just bump the fans up to 6000 rpm. Within 5 minutes, it’s cooled down to the 120-130 range and I shut the fans back off until it spikes again.

Hot case isn’t that big of a deal to me, I’ve never had a temp-related processor crash and I figure it’s just the price I pay for having a fast computer. Seems like a small price to me.

Far more irritating is the fact that it rarely if ever is willing to wake up after sleep. When I open the lid, the sleep light goes off but it never wakes up. Power button, nothing. Space bar, nothing. Mouse clicks, nothing. Close the lid, and the light comes ON and stays steady instead of breathing. Open it, light goes out. Close it, light comes back on solid. Have to hold the power button for 5 seconds to kill it and reboot. All system updates performed. Wish Apple would fix this instead of worrying about the temps.

I have 2 MBP. One is a “MBP 2,2″ with the Radeon x1600M and the other is a “MBP 3,1″ (Santa Rosa) with the Nvidia 8600M GT… Using a widget called iStat I see that the “2,2″ laptop runs, on average, 15C cooler at the GPU and 5C at the CPU. (The difference between the processor speeds is only .84MHZ) The temperatures labeled “memory” and “enclosure” read the same temperatures for both machines.

I found this post to be most interesting because I most certainly do not enjoy the higher temperatures of the new Santa Rosa notebooks. They run so hot that I cannot touch the metal between the first row of function keys and the screen without feeling burnt. I did open up the “3,1″, clear the gunk, and conservatively reapply arctic silver 5. I took my time and it wasn’t really a big deal. Anyone with computer building or repair experience shouldn’t be afraid to open up the MBP, they are a lot of fun to take apart and if you are careful they are not easy to break.

Anyway, who cares about that…

What happened after the reapplication is disappointing for me, but interesting under the context of this continuing thread…

All temperatures remained the same at the CPU, GPU, and Memory while the temperature reading at the two Heatsink locations increased by 2 degrees Celsius. The only drop in temperature was observed at the Enclosure (case) reading which dropped by 1 degree C.

So, I guess that the reapplication of the thermal compound did nothing at all. Everything is just as hot to touch as it ever was.

I thought it would be interesting to see how the different views of Peter and Kevin explain my results.

*I worked on a clean glass table and wore nitrile gloves. I used isopropyl alcohol and Qtips to remove the thermal compound.

The most disturbing part of the whole procedure is that I observed that in my “3,1″ MBP, the heatsink for the GPU was actually cracked!

It wasn’t broken apart, but there is a long gouge down the middle of it so that if you were to take a fingernail and run it past the heatsink you’d feel the irregular surface.

Also, the GPU chip itself is larger than the GPU heatsink, and the heatpipes are entirely black, no copper except for at the 3 heatsinks. I have plenty of pictures and just don’t know what to do about this computer. It can safely say that it is TOO HOT!
I’d be much happier if apple had figured out a way to increase performance without increasing the idle temp of the GPU by 20C!
Yes, the new 8600M runs at 65C on average while the older x1600M runs at 45C, at least that is what I observe in my two computers.

One other thing I should mention is that the ambient temperature where I currently am is between 26 and 30C (The Caribbean.) I haven’t opened anything other than the dashboard, safari, and iTunes on the “3,1″ MBP because at idle it is hotter than the “2,1″ MBP has ever been.

Since both computers live in the tropics I can’t find any reason to not blame Apple for this terrible temperature problem. Their previous generation MBP runs just fine here (at a cool 45C, lol) and while I appreciate the idea of a more powerful GPU, I’m almost positive the new temperature problems are entirely the fault of the new GPU (or the crappy GPU heatsink), since the CPU temps are rarely more than 5C away from each other and all the other temps are almost the same (Obviously the heatsink readings are higher since the GPU is 20C hotter in one computer vs. the other, but all the other temps are very close using iStat Pro widget.)
The new MBP is truly too hot to be of any use to me here.

What ever happened Mark?

Did you ever get a cool Santa Rosa MBP?

Thanks for this info. i got my mac book pro today and turn on 5 minutes and it was so hot and scaring me. damn……

Thence to the Apple Store. Opening “Activity Monitor” revealed that a freak process was running in the background using 100% of my CPU power – a printjob application. The Apple Genius (who did know his stuff – I was impressed) said that Hewlett Packard drivers in particular are problematic, and can sometime just hang in the background. Good news is, you can just kill them in the Activity Monitor.

Following the killed process, the computer temperature has dropped to an average of 117, and the fans are just ticking over at 2900 rpm.

Worth a look if you are having a “constant overheat” problem.

Tested and sworn for. smcFanControl is freeware.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23183

As for closing the lid, your MBP can sleep with the lid open. The energy saver utility is pretty good, I let my disks sleep overnight if I’m not downloading anything but they turn off automatically if there is no activity. Personally I like having the MBP to wake me up in the morning with some music playing, can’t do that with the lid closed :)