Operating temperatures for MacPro cores
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Rifty - 31 January 2009
I am not in an area which has been experiencing heatwaves though the temperature is probably 5-10 degrees hotter than normal at the moment - sitting round 25-30C. I have a 750 gig main hard drive installed, and 3 terabyte SATA drives in the other three bays (I do a LOT of movie work and need heaps of disk space!)
Today one of my terabyte drives isn't opening. When I got it out, it was hotter to the touch than I would like. I feel uneasy that the other drives in there must be operating at this temperature (and the drive isn't even spinning in this one.) I have a widget that shows temp control and it says that the startup drive is running at 39 C, Terabyte 1 is 29 C, Terabyte 2 is 29C, and Terabyte 3 is 37C. CPU A is 82C and CPU B is 81C which seems pretty high to me. CPU Heatsink 1 is 66C and CPU Heatsink 2 is 69C. The ambient temp is 31C.
As an experiment I have taken off the cover and am using an additional fan to blow directly into the box from the side. Is that a good idea or not? Are these the sorts of operating temperatures for the CPUs especially that you would expect? I can't seem to find any really consistent answers to this but I am worried that if the temps are higher than they should be, one not very old terabyte drive might have been fried by the high temps and the others may be at risk - and the CPUs - which I simply can't afford in my business. There's a limit to how much data you can back up in these circumstances.
I downloaded SMCFanControl and boosted the min speed to 1690 RPM on the CPU_MEM, IO and EXHAUST fans, and the PS is 1798. However, the icon in the menu bar says the fan is 500 rpm and the temperature is 69C. Maybe I need to restart for the software to take effect but I am not sure.
Any advice welcome. I just think that by the feel of the drive I took out, it was a lot hotter than I would like. (I do know that the whole system is supposed to zap out if the operating temperature gets too high to be safe for it to operate. At least that hasn't happened.) It may be that all is 'normal' and the drive just caved in all by itself. It was the one Time Machine was backing up to and it did an awful lot of work.
Rifty
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Rifty - 1 February 2009
OK - to answer some of my own questions - SMCFanControl does seem to need a restart to take effect initially. This is the first time ever since I have had the MacPro (about 20 months) that I have heard the fans cut in at anything but the min temps. It's slightly noisier but I feel easier about the internal temperature of the box.
For the record, the temps then (at default setting) and now (using SMCFanControl) are
Startup drive is running at 39 C, [now 36C]
Terabyte 1 is 29 C, [now 29C]
Terabyte 2 is 29C, [now 25C]
Terabyte 3 is 37C. [now 23C]
CPU A is 82C [now 40C]
CPU B is 81C [now 41C]
CPU Heatsink 1 is 66C [now 32C
CPU Heatsink 2 is 69C.[now 34C]
The ambient temp is 31C. [now 33C]So I've closed the box and taken the external fan away.
What bothers me is why didn't the MacPro automatically step up its fanspeed for the fans inside the machine when it was running so hot? The CPU temps in particular seem to me to have been very high. I do suspect that the terabyte drive that died couldn't have been happy running at high temperatures. I'd be curious to know what the temps of these are for the boxes of other MacPro users.
Incidentally the monitoring device is an excellent widget which I would recommend for anyone, especially in this hot weather:
istat pro
from islayer.com [available versiontracker.com]Rifty
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Emma Grey - 2 February 2009
Hi Rifty
I wish I had MacPro notes to share (:>
However, I did have a heat incident recently. On a 42 degree Sydney day a week or so back, my 2nd gen MacBook got so hot it started to 'smell' different, the little fan was pumping like the blazes, and the air it was expelling would have been useful in a few London winters I remember.
I don't have your technical knowledge, and had to use my instincts. The inclination to shut down was hampered by the knowledge that in the short term, the fan's cooling effect would be lost, and the internal temperature actually rise. But the change in 'smell' was the decider - it was WRONG.
Like yourself, I had wondered if the machine was programmed to protect itself - and one would hope that it would but there were no alerts, no action taken. You don't mention any olfactory evidence, and I myself have been amazed at the temperatures these gizmos seem happy at. I could fry eggs on my modem, and yet it's been pumping data happily for years now.
Sorry about your dead drive, though. Techies I've chatted to suggest that the bigger the drive, the shorter the life. I have a film-maker friend working in Bangkok at present; she says the heat factor influenced her decision to use external drives, and keep them outside of the CPU equation. I'll pass on the link to that widget.
All the best to you
Emma
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Rifty - 2 February 2009
Using that widget to control the internal temp would definitely go a long way towards keeping the inside of the box cool for her, which means she could safely add internal SATA drives. And another thing you can do is buy an external SATA docking unit and just drop the required SATA drive in it and use it USB. Not as fast, but tolerable.
All the best to you
And you - are you back in Oz to stay?
Rifty
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Rifty - 2 February 2009
Rifty wrote:
Using that widget to control the internal temp would definitely go a long way towards keeping the inside of the box cool for her,
Just to clarify that bit: I meant you can use the widget to check the temp and then use SMCFanControl to adjust the fanspeed. The widget doesn't do that. It just tells you when you're in trouble!
Rifty
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Emma Grey - 6 February 2009
Hi, Rifty, yes I am here 'for the duration', as they say - which means someone will have to bury me here, or sprinkle my ashes over the ocean. And indeed, I am a climate refugee. If I must have snow, then please, let it be in Zurich! The English seem to forget how to deal with it after each episode, and thus are totally unprepared every time. But what's going on in London now looks pretty much the same as the occasional white winters I remember as a child. Walking on Hampstead Heath in the snow was fun, with tea and cakes in Louis Hungarian pâtisserie afterwards. Does that compare with a pizza on my knees on a balmy evening at Bondi Beach? All places have their magic moments, and I like mine warm!
Australia might not be the obvious place for those who love the intellectual life, but it has that 'warmth' of tolerance, especially if you can mix with (other) European refugees and thinkers. And with the growing access to documentation of all sorts via the www, maybe the Global Village really is truly becoming possible.
All Sydney needs now is water as warm as your Queenland stuff (without the box jellies).
All the best to you and your Tower of Mac.
Emma
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Rifty - 11 February 2009
I have lived in Qld for less than half my life so far and am not likely to live there permanently ever again. But as long as I back Qld in the cricket and State of Origin, I guess I am a Queenslander at heart and always will be.
All the best to you and your Tower of Mac.
Thank you! Speaking of which, (and to return to something appropriate to a computer ng), you may remember I said I lost a terabyte SATA drive to failure - it was still in warranty. I accidentally slandered Western Digital by saying it was one of theirs, but it turned out to be a Seagate one - both the big WD ones are going fine, so apologies to WD for the error. I have emailed Seagate about their drive and have heard nothing back yet. To be fair they deserve a few days to reply. But my question is this:
If I put the SATA drive into a USB docking base, it spins up and it sounds like it is going to open, but it won't appear as an icon and Disk Utility can't see it. So nothing is getting past the optical reader. Yet the disk remains spinning, which suggests to me that the data on the drive may not be damaged at all - just a mechanical failure with the reading mechanism. Is there some way of finding this out without taking it to somewhere where it will cost a fortune to fix? Probably not, I suspect, but if anyone has opened a SATA drive and knows anything about these things from personal experience, I would love to hear from them.
riftynet - put a dot after rifty
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20cents - 13 February 2009
Previously,
(snipped the chit chat)
If I put the SATA drive into a USB docking base, it spins up and it sounds like it is going to open, but it won't appear as an icon and Disk Utility can't see it. So nothing is getting past the optical reader. Yet the disk remains spinning, which suggests to me that the data on the drive may not be damaged at all - just a mechanical failure with the reading mechanism. Is there some way of finding this out without taking it to somewhere where it will cost a fortune to fix? Probably not, I suspect, but if anyone has opened a SATA drive and knows anything about these things from personal experience, I would love to hear from them.
Could you put the dodgy HD into your tower and start up using the DVD? Or will the tower not recognise a 1TB drive?
regards,
20cents