MacBook – Way to limit CPU speed to prevent temperature spikes

macbook protemperature

I have a 17 inch MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. Occasionally, it heats up and the fan has to kick on. This happens typically during heavy CPU utilization, but also seemingly randomly when doing mundane tasks.

If I could half the speed of my CPU, it would still be more than fast enough for most of my day to day tasks. Is there a way to reduce the CPU speed for the entire system? Will this minimize the heat related issues and prevent the fan from kicking on?

Best Answer

It's not practical, but that model of MacBook Pro will run the CPU lower if the battery is disconnected since it can't count on the battery to work as a capacitor and the CPU/GPU can over draw the power supply.

Also - you could try gfxCardStatus to shift to the lower power GPU to reduce that source of heat.

If you are still running Snow Leopard, there are some CHUD tools in the performance testing folder of Xcode that let you to disable cores on processors which would let the system get less work down and generate substantially less heat. I don't know of a program to do this on Lion as the latest Lion build of Xcode didn't ship with the CHUD tools.

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MacBook Pro Retina 13 2013 – Fan Speed and Temperature Guide

What you are experiencing is quite normal for MBP. It may vary quite a lot with an ambient temperature above 28 degrees C. The only inconvenience with the high speed of the fan is the noise. Rather than that, you can keep it faster and the MBP will be cooler. Obviously also the fan life will be slightely reduced but they are so performing that most probably you will not see the end of the fan life. Another trick is to make sure the MBP is placed on a surface that can dissipate temperature. A wooden table or a glass table as well as your legs are not the best heat dissipators.

Macbook Pro – QuickLook CPU & Temperature Spikes on Mac OS X 10.8

To see what generators QuickLook has installed, open the Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and run the following command:

qlmanage -m

This will give you a quick dump of what is loaded at the moment with QuickLook. Also pay attention to what directories you have open at the time your CPU spikes (QL doesn't generate thumbnails for anything other than a directory or file being displayed in the Finder or other application viewing a file list).

It will output something like this

[uniform type identifier] -> path (version) [uniform type identifier] -> path (version - loaded)

The -m flag also accepts several arguments:

plugins Show the generators list (default action)
server Show quicklookd life information
memory Show quicklookd memory consumption
burst Show statistics about the last burst
threads Show concurrent accesses stats
other Show other information about quicklookd

Additionally, don't bother with man qlmanage as the manual isn't as good as the built-in help found at qlmanage -h.

If you want to see if DraftSight has a plugin loaded (or installed), try running qlmange -m plugins | grep -i "draftsight".

Best Answer

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MacBook Pro Retina 13 2013 – Fan Speed and Temperature Guide

Macbook Pro – QuickLook CPU & Temperature Spikes on Mac OS X 10.8

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