Michael Kratz

It’s always annoyed me that my MBP sometimes gets so hot that it is no longer comfortable to sit with it resting on my legs. It irks me that Apple have chosen to set the thresholds for the fans so low and quiet that the machine has to pretty much ‘burn skin’ before the fans will kick in at any decent rate and cool the machine down.

Well, today, I finally found the holy grail. I was having a look around MacFixIt.com when I came across a little utility called smcFanControl, which apparently has the ability to control the fan speed of the MacBook Pro!

I promptly downloaded the program and ran it. It’s a nice, simple, little app. with a couple of sliders for the two fans, and a display of both fan speeds. The sliders can be changed independently or locked together. I locked them together and cranked the speed up to 3,000rpm. The fan display showed my fans were currently running at 990rpm or therebouts. As soon as I hit Apply, the fans spooled up to 3,000, I could both hear and feel this as well as see the rpm readout in the program climb too.

It’s quite amazing how much difference it makes, after a minute or so at 3,000rpm, the temperature on the bottom of my MacBook Pro had dropped quite significantly. The slider lets you adjust the RPM from 1,000 all the way up to 6,000. At 6,000rpm, theres a mild gale-force wind (with accompanying noise) being emitted from the machine, but it becomes very cool!

If you’ve got a MacBook Pro, this utility is a must, get it here.