These Intel Macs, they run hot. Hotter than the burning sands of the Sahara. Hotter than an egg frying on your engine. Hotter than plasma, my friends. Hot.
While I was working my MacBook pretty hard today (converting a big digital video file into a smaller one), the fans ramped up to full blast. Checking out Activity Monitor showed me that, yes, iMovie was using up to 166% of my CPU (I’m guessing 200% would be maxing out both cores).
A little concerned that running the fans at full power might not be sufficient, I dug around to find something that would let me check the temperature of the processor. Recalling that Scott had posted about a database of Intel Mac temperatures, I found via that site a helpful little utility called CoreDuoTemp. The app does just what it says on the tin (although what it says is somewhat odd, given that English is not the developers’ first language), displaying a little window with the processor usage and temperature. Handy little utility to keep around.
