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Monat: April 2019

Preferred settings for Macs Fan Control on older iMacs that run hot and make funny noises

Veröffentlicht von Florian Panzer am 26. April 2019

Yesterday I encountered a customers iMac which ran crazy hot on the backside. Macs Fan Control indicated that the PSU was running on 70°C and more, and something made a buzzing sound (like a wire dangling inside a fan, which was not the case).

So I decided to set up the fans manually, the Mac now runs much cooler and still it’s not too loud.

Here’s my settings:

Set everything to manual
ODD Fan is controlled by GPU Diode. 40°C – 75°C (this controls the right hand side of the iMac)
The HDD fan is controlled by the HDD temperature. We set it to 45°C – 55°C. If your disk runs hotter, you’ll shorten its lifetime and jeopardize your data. This stuff is sitting in the middle of the iMac case.
OK, and this one here is most important. Set the CPU fan to be controlled by the PSU Primary temperature.

I learned that Apple did decide to „cool“ the PSU by blowing the CPUs hot air onto it. Duh. So since we need to make sure the PSU does not overheat and melt your display panels LED strips on the right side, we set the CPU fan speed in relation to the PSU temperature. We want the PSU to be 40°C – 53°C. The CPU temperature will also stay in this healthy temperature range.

Download Macs Fan Control on the dev’s website, on github, or from my local mirror (v4.1.12).

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