Ramblings of a Deranged Mind
Tuesday Dec 02, 2008
Changing power management settings in OS X
So the other night I was sitting in bed working on my MacBook Pro sitting on the blanket on my lap. After about 20 minutes I noticed that my legs were sweating, a lot!I picked up the MacBook Pro and it was *hot*, damn *hot*, felt like the chassis was on the verge of melting. So hit F12 and looked at iStat Pro and it showed most components at around the 50C mark, with both fans running above 2000 rpm.
My theory about what happened is that OS X waited too long before turning on the fans and now it wasn't cooling the system fast enough to lower the temperature. So doing some searching on the internet led me to an utility called Fan Control which allows me to change the minimum fan speed (I increased it to 2000 rpm from 1000 rpm) and to change the lower and upper trigger levels.
In my search for a solution to my overheating problem I discovered a way to turn off Intel SpeedStep, for those times where I need all the performance I can get without OS X trying to 2nd guess what my CPU speed should be.
To turn off Intel SpeedStep, use the following command:-
sudo pmset -a reduce 0
and change the 0 to 1 to turn it back on again.
Just checked iStat Pro again and everything is nice and cool, at least my legs are sweating. :-)
Comments?
Posted at 10:53AM Dec 02, 2008 by samktan in IT | Comments[0]