Mac/Crossover Issues (Abby Nicole: Continued....)

[coffeedog]

Your Mac Mini shouldn't be getting that hot with the LOTRO graphics settings you're using. 200°F is really hot. Anything over 190°F is really not good and ideally you shouldn't be over 190°F for very long because the thermal paste (the goop between the CPU and its heatsink, and other components and any heatsink they might have) will degrade if kept at higher temperatures for long periods of time. The CPU should be downclocking itself ("throttling") when the temps get much over 190°F in order to prevent damage to itself and other system components. It shouldn't be able to get to those kinds of temps with the Turbo Boost disabled!

If you can open up your Mac enough to expose the fan and the motherboard, you might find dust blocking air flow or covering the components. Gently remove the dust with compressed air, or a very soft brush while holding a vacuum cleaner head nearby to suck up the filth. Try to not inhale anything you dislodge from the computer.

Shoot, I was kinda hoping you'd tell me I was just being paranoid. But yeah, I was perplexed that the numbers I was seeing didn't seem to change whether I had TurboBoost disabled or not. Maybe relying on smcFanControl this long (especially on the MacBook) was a mistake, because I never really saw those numbers go above 173 F. So, if I *was* having this kind of overheating on 32-bit, smcFanControl wasn't really telling me. (But now it's even less of a mystery why the MacBook has gotten sooo slow and some of the keys have stopped working...)

You'll be shocked to hear that I have neither the mental bandwidth nor the intestinal fortitude to try to figure out how to open the Mini at this time. I never could get up the nerve to try it with the MacBook, which is I'm sure an unholy mess because of pets and such. But the Mini lives next door, where there are no pets and little dust, so I'm hoping I can skate on that for a while longer.

Interestingly, I haven't seen those crazy temps since I last posted. Maybe it was the time of day I was on (server load), or maybe TurboBoost wasn't actually disabled when it said it was? I was toggling it off & on quite a bit that day, looking for changes, and sometimes it didn't switch over immediately IIRC. I noticed that TurboBoost Switcher is set at a minimum refresh rate of 4s by default. It doesn't feel right to say it "just had to get used to the idea" but... maybe something like that?

I'm going to play some more and see if the temps start spiking again, with TurboBoost disabled. If they do, I'll try changing settings as you described. Will report back!

ETA: Sigh, nope, it's still happening. I got complacent when I didn't see it hit 200 F the past couple of days, but it's hovering in the 190s now and hit 205 F at one point. I just switched to 32-bit but it looks the same so far. Switching Brightness and Contrast to 1.00 (they were pretty close already) and Gamma was already there.

ETA2: Still running in 32-bit, have made all the setting changes and it's still about the same. I've got a browser window open with 2 tabs (this page and lotro-wiki.com), nothing else. In short: :/