eightbits.org

Ok, this might be the nerdiest blog post in the history of man, but it contains some information that I found to be immensely useful, so it deserves to be shared.

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m guilty of playing World of Warcraft on occasion. Fuck it, I won’t lie, it’s just a fun game. However, I have no intention of becoming another cautionary tale of WoW addiction.

Not me. I promise.

Now here’s the problem. Laptops aren’t exactly renowned for their ability to serve as gaming rigs. But a MacBook Pro is no slouch, which is why I have been surprised by the 160°F – 170°F temperatures that I get while playing. And that’s after cranking the fans up to their maximum (~6000 RPM) using smcFanControl.

Luckily, I happened upon a forum post where someone mentioned how you can tell the game to limit its framerate. So rather than making your graphics chip nearly melt itself in order to crank out frames that your eye can’t see anyway, you can tell it to run just fast enough to maintain smooth gameplay by typing this:

/console maxfps X

…where X is the framerate you want (I’m using 26). Let me tell you, not only does this work, but the results were dramatic. The CPU utilization stayed the same (averaging 60-70% for each core), but the temperature now hovers around 120°F – 130°F, and that’s with the fan speeds dialed way back from maximum (~4000 RPM). So clearly this was a case of the GPU working way harder than it needed to be. To further verify it, I turned the framerate back up to 100, and in less than a minute the temperature had climbed to 160°F. Your mileage may vary, but I’m betting you’ll notice a significant temperature decrease (and this is in no way limited to only MacBook Pros or even laptops in general).