[fox-orian]

I've have my Macbook Pro [2.2GHz Santa Rosa LED backlit etc] for about two weeks now, and I have to say I was getting annoyed at its idle temperature of around 57 to 59C. Hearing about all the issues with over-excited applications of thermal grease on the chips, I decided to open mine up and check the damage for myself.

I documented the position of each screw and cable so they could be put back exactly as they were before. Once I got the logic board out and flipped it over, I can't say I was very surprised by what I saw. Each chip had pretty good sized globs of rather hardened grease. It wasn't as bad as some of the photos circulating the net, but it was bad enough that it had overflowed around the four sides of each die. I cleaned it up and reapplied new Arctic Silver paste [to the chips only.] After closing my Pro up, it started up just fine. Idle temperatures now hover around 46 to 52C depending on its location.

Some interesting new things happen, though. Any sort of activity seems to raise the CPU temperature almost immediately. If I run the iTunes Visualizer [with the window dragged to take up the whole screen] the temperature of CPU A rises from 48C to 65C within 15 to 20 seconds. The moment I turn the visualizer off, the temperature drops back down to about 50C within about 10 seconds. Those seem like ridiculously fast heat-up and cool-down speeds -- is this something normal? I forgot to gauge normal temperature readings before I cleaned the chips.
If someone could let me know if their macbook pro heats up/cools down this fast?

Second strange thing is that my fans throttling appears to have ceased. When high temperatures appear, the fans remain steadily chumming away at 2000RPM, which is nowhere near the adequate speed to cool 65C. They just don't speed up period. I've used the smcFanControl program BEFORE I attempted this grease fix, is it possible the smcFanControll app has screwed the OS's ability to throttle the fan speed? I've checked the logic board and all fans / temp sensors are plugged in properly. I'm thinking of reinstalling Mac OSX to see if it fixes anything but, hm....

Anyone have thoughts as to what I should do?

EDIT:
Interesting, it seems that any change I make to smcFanControl sticks permanently. If I set the fans to 4000RPM, the fans will remain spinning at 4000RPM, even during the startup chime. I think smcFanControl is messing with my firmware.

EDIT2:
I just reinstalled OSX and seems to have fixed the unthrottling fan problem, thank god.
I suppose I'm just not used to the macbook pro running with efficient heat-pipes. The fans turn on much more frequently now, yet the overall core temperatures remain low, around 44 lowest to 62 absolute highest. I'm wondering if my re-greasing actually did work...?

[MacosNerd]

Did you zap the pram?
Since taking it apart and performing major surgery.

AFAIK the fans turning on more now then before is either because its getting hotter faster, i.e., you did not properly apply the heat or you're just noticing normal behavior since you are now sensative to the fan action.

What was your temperature range before because 44 to 62 it normal for these babies and if you were experiencing temps within that range then you probably didn't need to reapply the stuff.

[fox-orian]

Originally Posted by MacosNerd 

Did you zap the pram?
Since taking it apart and performing major surgery.

AFAIK the fans turning on more now then before is either because its getting hotter faster, i.e., you did not properly apply the heat or you're just noticing normal behavior since you are now sensative to the fan action.

What was your temperature range before because 44 to 62 it normal for these babies and if you were experiencing temps within that range then you probably didn't need to reapply the stuff.

I actually probably didn't need to do it, but I guess I was just interested.
By this time I've heavily heavily researched the problem and fixed it.
1) I reinstalled Mac OS, this fixed the smcFan issue, fans run normally.
2) I opened my MBP back up again and applied MORE thermal paste to reduce efficiency. What happened before was that the small amount of thermal paste was SO efficient at removing heat from the CPU, the CPU cores remained at around 38C, and 100% of the heat escaped into the heatpipes and then into the casing. This would be more ideal for the system if only it were comfortable -- the casing became so hot, it would give your skin first degree burns after one second of contact with the skin. Now that I've applied just a tad more paste to each chip, the efficiency of the heat removal has dropped back to an awesomely acceptable level. [Idle remains around 46C and the case remains bottom remains around 35C. I'm used to how thermal paste is supposed to be applied to a computers heatsink, but I didn't think about how things have to be wildly different inside of a laptop like this. Maybe Apple applies that much thermal paste for a reason, because after applying more, I'm noticing much better results.