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Control your Intel Mac fan speeds

Published by Matthew Jeppsen February 22nd, 2007 in Hardware, News

smcFanControl 2.0 is donationware software that enables you to simply and easily setup thresholds and better control your MacIntel workstation or notebook cooling fans. Simple, but might be handy. Can someone with an Intel mac please drop a comment and let us all know how it works?
(Via Lifehacker)

5 Responses to “Control your Intel Mac fan speeds”  

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  1. 1 Joel Peregrine Feb 22nd, 2007 at 8:32 am

    Works great! I’ve been editing on a 17″ MacBook Pro for a few weeks and its unbelievable how hot it gets. Bumping the minimum high rpm speed has measurable results on the temperature. For example when I loaded it temp was hovering around 145 F. Bumping the rpm minimum up to 4000 knocked it down to 115 F in a few minutes. Luckily the fan is much more quiet than the PowerBook this computer replaced, but its noticeable at 4000 rpm. At 2000 rpm you could barely hear it, so there is a trade off…

  2. 2 Matthew Jeppsen Feb 22nd, 2007 at 9:38 am

    Great! Thanks for checking into that, Joel. Now if only there was such a solution to control fan ramping on my G5 2.7 DP…

  3. 3 Joel Peregrine Feb 22nd, 2007 at 11:00 am

    Hey,

    You can control it but only by running at reduced processor setting. It’s really annoying and was one of the reasons for my switch to a laptop. I use SpeedMenu on my G5 to throttle down the processor (and as a result the fan stays low and quiet) during work that isn’t processor intensive:

    http://www.bresink.com/osx/CPUSpeedMenu.html

    Its much easier than diving into the preferences to change that setting.

  4. 4 Dean Harrington Aug 24th, 2007 at 3:32 am

    Works fine on the intel 17″ 2.3.3 CPU. heat hovers around 120F on a hot summer day running at normal usage. I edit FCP and then it gets a bit hot.
    good stuff here!

  5. 5 Kendal Miller Aug 24th, 2007 at 8:21 am

    Thanks for the feedback guys I’m going to have to load this onto my MBook Pro today last night I was offloading P2 cards in a hot stuffy warehouse and it got really hot.

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