Mac heats up and general mac performance.

[Spankyouverymuch]

Hello, I'm a newbie. I use a Mac Book Pro and, according to SLs techincal details it should work pretty well. It's 2.2 GHz with 8Gb of memory, 1600 MHz

However, while viewing SL the hard drive speeds up and can be heard whirling away like a dervish, and the machine itself heats up to the point where you can get a red mark by touching it!

The effect is, of course, worse on busy sims, but even standing in a sandbox a fair bit of strain on the laptop seems to be involved.

Macs are, of course, individual beasts and, looking through the community here I see different people have had varied experiences with SL on a Mac.

I've tried the SL viewer, Firestorm and Singularity. The first 2 had the same effect and the third ran very slowly.

The basic advice of lessening quality, stopping music etc has had no real effect.

If anyone can advise me of what to do, or give me any tips on how to reduce the strain my Mac's obviously having with SL, I'd be very grateful

[Freya Mokusei]

I'd be surprised if SL definitively caused the hard disk to over-perform. It seems more likely that you're mis-attributing the sound of the graphics hardware and associated cooling? The hard disk outputs relatively little heat compared to a full graphical load on your GPU (which SL will definitely and regularly cause).

Cooling is definitely going to be an issue for you, Macbook Pro's are not adequately cooled by design, Apple do not expect them to be used for medium or long term 3D applications (anything over maybe half an hour). You may be able to encourage better results using a cooling mat or other cheapish accessory, but ultimately your device likely isn't designed for complex 3D rendering.

Ultimately your only option for using such a compact, heat-retaining device to operate within Second Life would be to use text-only viewers. There are significantly better devices available for use with predominantly 3D environments.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Spank,

As Freya says, it's not your hard drive that's making the whirring sounds. If your MacBook Pro has a retina display, it has no hard drive. Over the last few years, all MacBook Pros except the entry level non Retina 13" have switched to solid state drives.

it's your CPU/GPU fan that's winding up. Thin and light laptops (the only kind Apple makes) do not have the cooling capacity for the kind of graphics intensive work that SL requires. And if you have a Retina Macbook Pro, you've got 4x as many pixels for the graphics processor to push around.

Your only recourse is to dial back your draw distance, move your graphics slider towards "Low" and perhaps look for a laptop cooling pad (which won't make a huge difference).