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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Massive tip if you decide to stay with a < 2015 MacBook Pro.

Open up the laptop and reapply the thermal paste on the CPU with something high quality like Arctic Silver. It really needs redoing after 1-2 years. This will result in a significant improvement to overall performance. Why ? Because when OSX detects that the laptop is overheating it schedules a dummy task e.g. secd or kernel_task to throttle the CPU. Cool the laptop and the throttling stops. Use iStat Menus or top to check for the process.

Takes all of 10 minutes and iFixit can guide you through it. As much of a performance difference as going from HDD->SSD. The other most vital thing to do on OSX since all of the daemons result in lots of random reads (check fs_usage).

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This. This. This.

I have "refurbished" 2 MacBook Pros now, and this is part of my process. Max out the RAM, install SSD, replace battery, reapply thermal paste, clean with canned air. When I did this to a 2009 13" MBP that got me through grad school (already had max RAM and an SSD), I found that it ran cooler than I remember it running when I first bought it. Recently, I bought a used 2011 15" MBP (no HDD, swelled up battery, popped out trackpad, missing case screws) for $100. I used an SSD from my desktop that recently became a media server, then spent $110 on 16 GB of RAM, a new battery, and screws. That machine is killing it.

This is one of the things that saddens me about everything after the retina MBP transition: we can no longer do all of these kinds of major performance enhancements on our own, and some of these repairs have become much more difficult.

Edit: I use Noctua NT-H1 because it has excellent thermal characteristics and it isn't electrically conductive so it won't kill your hardware if you get it somewhere you shouldn't.

http://noctua.at/en/nt-h1.html

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/noctua_nt_h1/5.htm

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Noctua/NT-H1/4.html

Is this specific to certain years only? I have a 2012 non-retina and it is great, but apparently certain years had more problems than others. Would you recommend it for my 2012 model too?

As a more reliable way to confirm if you have some thermal problem on an older Mac, download and run Intel Power Gadget. That shows the current frequency of the CPU, and when combined with running some program that puts all cores under load, you can see if the frequency drops below what is designed for.

Be aware it isn't always thermal paste that is the culprit. I had a 2012 Retina 15" MBP that was normally 2.6GHz but would drop down to 1.4GHz. That was purely due to the fans and (tiny) vents getting choked up. Solved by opening and using compressed air to clean, no fiddling with CPU paste.

Not sure. But I suspect it is in the more recent years where the thinner unibody has been required to take on more of the cooling duties. So if you are like me and use your laptop on the bed, on your lap etc then you are by design preventing the laptop from cooling properly.

Everything I've seen says thermal paste is only effective at most a couple of years. It is harder to replace on your 2012 model but not difficult:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid...

This is a general issue affecting lots of notebooks from all vendors.

Sure. But what I haven't seen on Windows or Linux is the deliberate high priority scheduling of a dummy process designed to throttle the CPU.

The CPU will throttle itself soon enough after that anyway. The only difference would be that without the kernel throttling it earlier, it can get a bit hotter and last a bit longer before throttling.

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