Many Mac owners have long complained that their beloved machines run extremely hot. New tests conducted by PC Authority have found that people are right to complain, they tested a Core i7 Macbook Pro and found it to climb over 100 degrees celsius.
PC Authority tested a Core i7 620M based 17” Macbook pro, running several different benchmarking tests. After initial tests they concluded that the Mac scored lower in some tasks such as rendering in Photoshop than expected. Since they knew that the processing power should make running programs such as Photoshop a breeze, they began wondering if the problem was heat based, so “they propped the machine on its side and repeated the test. Performance improved.”
Having booted into Windows via Boot Camp, PC Authority, ran several tests, and games to identify the temperature level of the Mac, initially they reached temperatures of up to 84ºC stating that the bottom casing was “almost too hot to touch.” When running Cinebench 11.5, PC Authority recorded temperatures up to 90ºC and eventually broke 100 during a second test of Cinebench 11.5.
While we haven’t tried the tests described above, we can confirm that while running Final Cut Express, and Pro, the Mac does sometime climb way up in the 90’s and sometimes during rendering even reaches 100 degrees. Since many users expected this to be a problem from previous models, such as the Core Duo 15” Macbook Pro, which has been known to have heat issues in the past, many were surprised to see this problem continue on the newer machines such as the i7.
If you’ve got one of the 17″ i7 MacBook Pros, we would be interested in hearing whether your Macbook Pro runs so hot you can fry an egg on it.
The Mac URL 