Too Much Fan Noise from your New MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo? A Fix
We noted in the speed test of our new 2.33GHz 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo (C2D) that its fans run more, run faster and run noisier than our original 2.16GHz 15" MacBook Pro. This perplexed us because we thought Apple should have worked out this aspect of the Intel-based notebooks in its third generation offerings. By now we've read many accounts online of how much quieter other C2D's were running and thought we'd have to take ours to an Apple tech to have a look at it.
But before we did so, we tried one last thing. We reset the System Management Controller (SMC) by disconnecting the AC adapter, removing the battery and holding down the power button for 5 seconds. This should have been the first thing we tried because after reassembling our C2D, it runs another 2-3oC cooler during "normal" use and the fans run nearly whisper quiet up to at least 59oC (CoreDuoTemp reading) rather than immediately revving up to 3800-4200rpm when exceeding the 55oC reading--"normal" use being defined as anything that doesn't excessively use the hard drive or graphics card.
We also noticed that our C2D runs up to 5oC cooler if there are no applications open that use Rosetta. Our biggest problem in this regard is Adobe GoLive CS2 so we longingly look forward to the Universal Binary version which is far, far away, i.e.next spring.
Apple's Technical Article #303319 covers resetting the SMC. [Bill Fox]
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