The Open Hardware Monitor is a free open source software that monitors temperature sensors, fan speeds, voltages, load and clock speeds of a computer. DriveDx showed my just out of AppleCare iMac with two pre-fail conditions for.Open Hardware Monitor - Core temp, fan speed and voltages in a free software gadget. Advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. The temperature warnings are also added automatically to Notification Centers How I fixed kernel_task consuming 100% of my MacBook’s CPU. Furthermore, the Temp Monitor utility displays audio and visual notifications via macOS Notification Center feature, and it they are by default set to be alerts which will not go away until manually dismissed, an excellent idea for when you are away from your Mac and the CPU temperature goes above the safe threshold.That lasted for about 30 seconds. Although MacBook Pro doesn’t have enough power to run it in 4K resolution, it works reasonably well in 1280x1024.However, this time it was a different story.Once I started the game, the CPU went to 100% and the frame rate dropped from above 40FPS to one frame per few seconds. NESDIS GOES CS2.0 Certfied Expanded operating temperature range -40 to.Recently I started experiencing a weird issue with my 2016 MacBook Pro.I occasionally play Velocidrone FPV racing simulator on it.I thought that could fix the slowdown. I checked my SSD for filesystem errors, found a few and had them repaired. However, I couldn’t find any correlation with any of the above.Over the next few days I tried a few different things to fix that: One of my friends suggested that the slowdown was caused by a heavy memory or I/O activity. One thing was clear - something was hogging my CPU.I asked around. And so on.When I looked at the CPU load chart it looked like this:The CPU was consumed by “kernel_task” whatever that wasAnd this is what it looked like when it came back to normal:No matter how much I tried, I wasn’t able to find a reason for that behaviour.What was that mysterious “kernel task”? The search on the internet didn’t bring clarity.
![]() Temperature Monitor Sierra Software That MonitorsGfxCardStatus could do that. In the past, there was a way to tell macOS which GPU it should use. However, I had no control over it. In my case, most likely, it is due to misbehaving thermal management.Once CPU load goes up and CPU heats up beyond a dangerous level, the system thinks that the CPU is overheating. There may be a variety of reasons for that. It has been described before by Kris Wouk. These days applications can demand a switch to desecrate graphics and there’s nothing you user can do about that.After some time I found that I am was dealing with a known problem. To me, that sounded pretty extreme. My MacBook was just slightly warm and the CPU fans barely kicked in.Despite being a known problem, it appeared that nobody knew how to fix that for sure.One of the suggested fixes which worked for some people involved deleting the SMC prop file. However, in my case, the CPU wasn’t overheating. When a system overheats, macOS takes CPU cycles upon itself by creating a bogus load manifesting itself as a CPU-heavy “kernel task” process.I was dealing with a textbook example of thermal throttling.That makes perfect sense. It is macOS itself, its kernel. It does that by taking CPU cycles away from the process which uses a lot of it and giving them to “kernel tasks” process which effectively does nothing.Strictly speaking, “kernel tasks” is not a process (although Apple themselves call it a “process”). Since the laptop wasn’t new, the cost of that would likely be more expensive than the MacBook itself.One solution I could see was getting an external GPU. They would most likely tell me that the logic board requires replacement. While it may help the CPU throttling, nothing would stop CPU from overheating and eventually breaking down.I thought about taking the laptop to Apple. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want my desk space occupied by a large box. But I finally decided against getting one after reading this article on Business Insider. If I wanted, I could play demanding 3D games.I started researching external video cards. And, as a bonus, that would give me desktop-class performance. That would off-load my built-in discrete graphics chip. Then I’d need to spend at least a few hundred dollars on the video card. That cost doesn’t contribute to anything. By itself, without a video card, it is more than $500 AUD. However, to my surprise, I wasn’t experiencing CPU throttling. Once I started the test, all of my CPU cores were instantly loaded to 100% and the CPU temperature quickly reached more than 90 degrees. It puts a huge strain on the CPU by rendering a static 3D scene via ray tracing. I potentially could buy an unsupported video card and be stuck with it.Besides, it wasn’t guaranteed that an external video card would solve my problems after all.I wanted to see how my MacBook behaves under heavy load. However, not every AMD Radeon is supported too. MacOS does not support NVidia video cards, so my choice would be limited to AMD. Once I launched the benchmark I have got exactly what I was expecting: Once the GPU heated up to 75 degrees C, kernel tasks hogged the CPU until the temperature dropped below 70 degrees. I wanted to see how my computer behaves under heavy 3D load. Unlike the latter, it runs on Macs. It is an equivalent of 3DMark. I realised that the next logical step would be to find apply load to GPU.I downloaded Valley UNIGINE benchmark. I bump up the quality settings to put an even higher load on the GPU. That time my GPU temperature stayed under 75 degrees and I didn’t experience any throttling. And a MacBook has a lot of them.It also has a nifty feature - it can override speeds of cooling fans.I cranked up the fan speeds and re-launched Valley benchmark. In particular with the GPU’s cooling.A friend pointed me at iStat Menus - a system monitor that can show a myriad of different stats such as readings of temperature sensors. Apparently has been causing GPU problems for ages.For instance, to apply a piece of thermal pad between the CPU, GPU or heat pipe and the aluminium case. That design has been present in all MacBooks since 2011 till at least 2019. If one gets hot, the other one does too. The CPU and GPU inside that are connected to the cooling fans by one same heat pipe:That means that the CPU and the GPU are heating each other. C emulator for macBesides, quite likely that the cooling fans in my MacBook were clogged with dust. And replacing it with something of better quality makes a difference even on a healthy laptop.If I could take off the thermal pipe in my laptop and replace the thermal paste, possibly that would fix my throttling issue. Since I often worked with the laptop on my laps, that solution wasn’t ideal.Luckily there are more ways to improve the cooling.This Snazzy Labs’ video suggests that the quality of the thermal paste Apple applies between the CPU, GPU and heat pipe isn’t good. The downside of the laptop would quickly heat up potentially all the way up to 90 degrees C or more. ![]() ![]()
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