Monday, April 26, 2010

Core i7 MacBook Pro Could Make Water Boil

Core i7 MacBook Pro Could Make Water Boil








PC Authority was putting their new 17-inch, Core i7 MacBook Pro through their typical battery of benchmarks. Then, the chassis grew hot and a series of strange errors began to occur.

The only way they could complete the testing was to turn the MBP on its side. The problem had to be heat.

So PC Authority tried more tests (in both Boot Camp and OS X) while tracking CPU temperatures all the while. Skeptical of their own results, they turned off the system overnight and tested things again.

In both instances, Cinebench—which is designed to tax the CPU in full—was able to heat the actual i7 cores to temperatures around 101°C, or almost 214°F.

That's hotter than the boiling point of water.

When the tests were repeated on a Fujitsu Lifebook SH 760 (loaded with the same i7 processor, but also a copper heatsink that vents out of side of a plastic chassis), the CPU was found to run at 81°C, or 178°F.

To be fair, PC Authority admits that everyday use only cranked up the heat of the MBP CPU to around 194°F (still significantly hotter than the Fujitsu working at max CPU capacity)—but here's the rub: The MBP 17 isn't the sort of computer you buy for everyday use. You buy it to have a mobile processing workhorse. And it's hard to imagine that professionals won't find themselves dealing with these heat issues. Also, seeing these results in the 17-inch model makes us wonder, how will the smaller, 15-inch i7 deal with the heat? [PC Authority]

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