Macbook pro early 2011 overheating

Hello there
I installed the last version of xbmc on my macbook pro early 2011 and as the program is launched, that is when I'm not seeing any video, the temperature of the cpu jumps from 50° C to 81° C. If I close the program the temperature returns to its standard values.

Another interesting thing is that if I play a video the temperature passes from 81° to 71°.

The cpu usage(of a single core I presume) is 20% when I visualizze the inizial page of xbmc and it raises to 40% when I play a video.

Isn't this strange?

I don't think that 81 degrees could be described as overheating I usually use iTunes and with a similar level of CPU usage during video playback (20%) I get a temperature of around 71 . When converting video with 100% usage after 30 mins I often see temps over 100 degrees. This is on a 2010 Macbook pro i7 processor.

Nothing to do with XBMC really other than people don't seem to appreciate the amount of processing required when displaying menus (as everything is rendered continuously not as a static items - as i understand it)

Quote:Another interesting thing is that if I play a video the temperature passes from 81° to 71°.

Depends on the video. If, for example, it is h.264 mp4 it will be hardware accelerated and so the processor will barely be used.
Conversely if it is mkv from a blu-ray the processor may be maxed out in one core (so for dual core mac that would be 100% out of 400%, as ffmeg is single threaded)

The 71 - 81 degrees in temp could possibly be the threshold at which the fans kick in.

If you want to learn (kinda) more about temperatures i suggest heading to the macbook pro forums - usually quite good for info.
If you want to lower the temperatures smc fancontrol is a good utility for this:
http://www.eidac.de/?p=180

If you're not watching stuff on your lap then temperature should never be an issue (apple seems to prefer running computers hot than increase fan speed and therefore noise).

So in short:

Quote:Isn't this strange?

Nope.

pseudo7 Wrote:Nothing to do with XBMC really other than people don't seem to appreciate the amount of processing required when displaying menus (as everything is rendered continuously not as a static items - as i understand it)


Depends on the video. If, for example, it is h.264 mp4 it will be hardware accelerated and so the processor will barely be used.
Conversely if it is mkv from a blu-ray the processor may be maxed out in one core (so for dual core mac that would be 100% out of 400%, as ffmeg is single threaded)

The 71 - 81 degrees in temp could possibly be the threshold at which the fans kick in.

If you want to learn (kinda) more about temperatures i suggest heading to the macbook pro forums - usually quite good for info.
If you want to lower the temperatures smc fancontrol is a good utility for this:
http://www.eidac.de/?p=180

If you're not watching stuff on your lap then temperature should never be an issue (apple seems to prefer running computers hot than increase fan speed and therefore noise).

So in short:

Nope.

First I forgot to mention that my latop is i5 dual core powered 13'' macbook pro. then I have no discrete grafics but intel's HD 3000 integrated in the processor.

To be honest I'm already using fancontrol to check the fan's speed and the core's temperature. The fan begins to kick in at 60 degrees and it reaches maximum speed at 90 degrees.

Plus I made a test running the same video with vlc and the temperature varied between [55,60] degrees with the core's 20% of usage.
We are talking about a 720p mkv codificated with the h.264 codec.

To be honest I'm curious to know why there is such use of resources and if it depends upon a bug or something like that. I would like to use xbmc to see my videos because I really like its interface but this "overheating" deteriorates the battery life affecting the portability of my macbook.

Default maximum fan speed on macbooks generally tends to be 3000 rpm but you can crank them up to 6000 rpm which has a noticeable effect.

Quote:but this "overheating" deteriorates the battery life affecting the portability of my macbook

But it's not over heating - my macbook pro reaches 90 degrees centigrade for hours at a time when encoding (or 71 if fans cranked up to 6000rpm). It's fine.

Bottom line it's Apple design - i suggest you take it up with them.
Again macrumors forums have loads of debate on temperatures - you would prob get more discussion if you took you topic there. For example this was on the first page of forum about macbook pro:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1116570 (didn't bother reading it)

But i suspect your claim about excess temperature produced by the laptop damaging battery performance isn't true. I certainly haven't heard of it.
Ifixit shows the battery should go above 100 degrees centigrade:
http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/OOEoW...Kwedl.huge

XBMC definitely isn't hogging your resources. 40% not loads, in fact if mine shows 40% that means 40% out of 400% (2010 model) so is using 10% really.
The little extra cpu is, as touched on before, likely due to rendering the interface and under components you like so much.

In summary:
No bug, laptop is fine, temperature discussion not really for here as xbmc isn't behaving badly and XBMC is great.

Sorry probably I was not clear. I know that i5 and i7 can work even at 100 degrees without receiving damage. My problem is:

higher temperature=higher power consumption=less battery life=less portability.

Plus other players doesn't have this type of behaviour so I suppose that there is a margin of improvement. So I thought that asking on xbmc's forum could help to improve the media center.

I guess the biggest thing to bear in mind is that XBMC is a media centre & media player rather than just a media player.

Media centres tend to be plugged in, not designed with portability in mind like a laptop and the audience is perhaps more concerned with picture quality etc rather than a little decrease in CPU usage.

Performance may improve with revision due to updating codecs and the new audio engine (i'm looking forward to that one!) but I doubt it's something the developers would actively work on.

Congrats on the 2011 macbook pro, I wouldn't mind a 15" new one (just for the encode speed alone). (edit no hardware acceleration = fail!)

Hello

same behavior on my MBP 13,3 2,3 8GB RAM (early 2011).
XBMC is running, only scanning the Music Lib via SMB on my TC at startup, no videoplay or anything else!
The processor load is not really high 20-30% but there is no decoding, only the lookup in the remote directory and put the data in the mymusic.db. That is really rediculous to hear the fan so loud. If I am playing a *.flv file via vlc everything is fine, with the processor load and the fan speed....

Why is the XBMC process generates such a high load?

XBMC is not a static screen, it is constantly rendered

They had a project about this:
http://xbmc.org/topfs2/2010/05/24/beagle...gsoc-2010/

Quote:The problem with XBMC is that it is just too heavy to render as is. Most of the time the interface sits close to static and while a user would perceive this as an idle state, XBMC is far from idle. Every frame the application renders the interface from the ground up and no matter if the interface is completely static this is done at 30-60 times a second!

Have the same "problem" with new Macbook. The CPU load generated by interface rendering is around 20%. Since my MBP has SSD and usually _very_ quiet it makes a big difference noise-wise.
I have also checked old windows laptop, XBMC eats CPU resources at the same remarkable rate.
Hope this annoying behavior of the great media player will be fixed soon.