Noiz Waves

Ever since the purchase of the MacBook Pro i’ve been keen to invest in some kind of external cooling mechanism. Spending a short amount of time at full load causes the fans to spin wildly and internal temperatures to skyrocket! Clearly external cooling would help, and I thought eBay had saved the day…

however sadly I was mistaken. The USB powered notebook cooler (made in China of course, surprise surprise) made absolutely no difference to internal temperatures or fan speeds. In fact, the temperatures seem to go up slightly!

When performing certain tasks, such as video encoding, heavy computation, virtualisation and (probably) gaming, CPU and GPU usage will peak, sometimes continually during the whole task. This is very effective are producing heat, and the MacBook Pro isn’t designed for efficient heat removal at all! The two little fans towards the back of the main logic board spin fast, make a lot of noise, and push minimal air our of the back.

As a result, after a couple of minutes at full load, temperatures can reach 80 degrees Celsius and fan speeds ~ 4500 rpm (a lot higher than the 2000 at idle). This is not at all suitable, especially as the need to run many virtual machines at once as well as heavy calculations will increase as I get stuck into my Honours project. Something needed to be done, so it first time to see if anything could be done…

After executing some homemade proof-of-concepts (jacking MBP up on some pegs and using an old PC fan underneath), it became obvious that external cooling was effective. Temperatures dropped significantly, and internal fan speed and noise decreased. Excellent, something can be done!

Instead of jumping straight into DIY’ing a cooling dock, I checked out the coolers available on eBay. This one caught my eye

and it only cost AU$13 all up. Not a bad buy; making one would certainly cost more than $13. It only took about a week for it to arrive (credit card and PayPal is much much quicker than bank account direct debit and PayPal) and its unboxing was keenly photographed.

The design of this 2.0 Watt air blowing beast is what impressed me most and made me buy it. Unfortunately, upon plugging it in, its good design appeared to be superficial, as in operating, it was a piece of shit.

Anyone who has played with a red hot MBP will know the gentle stream of hot air that spills out the back just below the screen hinge. Now, this hot air is being vacuumed into the notebook cooler! Whats worse, this hot air is then blown across the bottom of the case. This stream of air would be aimed towards the center of the case as well, which is not the hottest part. The case is hottest at the top, right where the notebook rests on the cooler’s rubber stoppers :S

Fearing the notebook would quickly melt onto the cooler and form a Frankenbook Pro, the cooler was quickly removed from operation, never to be used for cooling MBP again.

Am I suprised at the poor quality of the product? No, not really. For AU$2.99 plus $10 postage, what did I expect? Oh well, at least I learnt from someone elses mistakes, which will be important when designing and building my own cooling station.

The exercise wasn’t a total loss either. Reading the rear of the cooler’s packaging reveals a few classic gems of engrish. This piece is almost frameable. Makes me laugh every time I read it.

Classic!