Macbook Pro: Bipolar fans?

mooseeeeey

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Jun 24, 2011
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Hi. SO I have a Macbook Pro I use for gaming, and my question is with the fans. When in normal use, the fans are fine, when I'm in an older FPS/RTS mix game (Savage XR if anyone asks) that runs with ever so slightly faster fans and higher GPU/CPU temps. The fans get to about 60% of full speed when I'm playing Starcraft 2 (2010) yet for some reason go full blast, or at least higher than Sc2 when I'm playing Age of Empires 2 (1990 something). So my question is, do you think there's something wrong with the mobo fan control, some weird thing in the OS (WinXP), or something completely wrong?

EDIT: Just quick stats:
SC2 uses about 1GB of my 2GB of RAM, and 30% or so CPU power (dual core 2.66Ghz)
AoE2 uses around 100MB RAM on larger battles and never more than 3% CPU
 
it's possible the mobo is being strange, probably something to do with you running a full screen game and it thinking oh no why am I getting such low temperatures, something wrong, lets crank up the fans.

I think it might be a failsafe in mobo programming that gets tripped for wrong reasons.
 

mooseeeeey

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Jun 24, 2011
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Ya, I Know they're not gaming machines, but I got a $3000 laptop for free and it's the best computer I own. I am getting a cooling fan soon and praying that will help a lot.
 
it will not help a lot. If you were having overheating problems, it won't solve them, it will lighten the symptoms slightly, you will still overheat it will just take longer with a cooler...

I doubt your machine is having heat issues since it shouldn't be working all that hard for the games you list

what is the gpu in it?
 
that's pretty high, when was last time you blew out dust from the heat sinks?

Seems that your gpu is nearing the end of its capacity on games so fans need to work extra to keep it cool. But as said before, it is not a gaming machine, so that is to be expected, my advice if you see temperatures like that set the fans to run as high as possible.

I'm still not sure why you would observe age of empires incurring higher fan speeds than SC2. but an idea could also be that a game that old has to run fully on CPU, so gpu doesn't help at all, so resulting load on cpu might be higher than during SC2 where majority of graphics is expected to me processed by gpu. But that's just taking a guess, no real way to pinpoint.

An advice above, getting a laptop cooler, as I said already will help keep the temperatures from climbing as steeply but if you are hitting overheating thresholds right now, it will only delay the time it takes to overheat rather than solving the problem.