[Alex Donnelly]

Hi

I have just joined this forum (after years of lurking about looking for solutions) to ask a question about your Mac Book Pro early 2011 If I may?

I just bought the exact same model, from the Mac store refurbished, actually appears to have been used barely at all. Brand New Condition, with Lion and all firmware updates were not done, they were available to be downloaded with update checking which I did. And after that installed an SSD in main drive bay and 16 GB ram and Mountain Lion 10.8.4.

It appears to be running well, with temperatures in tolerance, CPU 40 to 50% celcius and fan speed at 2000 rpm’sh when doing basic things, all the time until I Use Final Cut X 10.0.9 to real time preview (busy project with lots of filters etc…) Real time preview in Motion 5 or even record the screen with Quick time and sound flower. (Firefox playing an HTML 5 video).

I am aware that the Radeon graphics card will get hot after continued use in these conditions and activate the fans. The temperatures I am seeing are about 75 to 80 celcius and fan hits about 5000 rpm ish. When render or use stops it quickly cools and is quiet again. From a look about the web this is normal for a MBP 17″

What has me a bit worried is that I also use an early 2011 15″ MBP with a quarter of the video memory (also radeon) for about a year now and while it reports similar temperatures in the same circumstances and even gets warmer according to at Monitor the fan does not hit the same speeds or volume as the 17″. One of the bonus’s of the 17 was apparently that it had better cooling with the larger frame.

I am going to go back to Lion with the original factory disk and test in that with at Monitor (the build that reads GPU and no longer works in 10.8) to specifically see what the GPU temps are and look about the web a bit more.

From what I can gather it is potentially normal behaviour (even though the 2011 15″ I use is quieter and fans run lower even when the machine is running hotter) or there is an issue with the GPU that could hopefully be fixed by better application of thermal paste (really dont want to have to do that myself) or send it back which is always a pain, where would one get one of these now rare models in such good condition again without braving ebay 🙂

Thanks in advance if you could comment on the normal operating behaviour of your early 2011 MBP 17″.

Alex