New Original Cpu Cooling Fan For Mac
The little cooling fans inside of Mac notebooks run upwards of 6000 RPM, and they can eventually wear out. People report symptoms of rattling and even loud grinding.
Well, the fan MAY need replacement. Or perhaps it just needs to be relubricated.
When my 2007 MacBook Pro's left cooling fan started rattling really loudly last night, I thought I was in for a time-consuming repair. Every place I called had a 2 or 3 day lead time on the part and a 2-day turn-around for the repair once the part was in. The fan itself costs at least $40, and the labor charges were at least $60. I was irritated at the prospect of spending at least $100 on a 4-year-old notebook that I plan to replace in like two months when the new model comes out. One of the places I called suggested that blowing the dust out might help. Dust can accumulate on the blades and throw it out of balance. I opened up the computer (according to ) and aimed my can of 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane at it.
That didn't work for me, unfortunately. After some research and tinkering, I learned that some of these brushless fan motors can lose their lubrication over time, and moreover, they can be RE-lubricated. Is what the fan looks like when removed from the computer. I wish I had taken a photo of the fan disassembled. You can unscrew the two tiny phillips head screws on the fan and lift the top plate and motor from the housing below. Then you can gently pry the black plastic circular hub (with the blades) away from the motor, and it'll pop off. What's left on the top plate looks vaguely like.
The circular hub contains a magnetic ring and a spindle pin that kinds looks like what's on the right side of. I dipped a swab in some motor oil (sewing machine oil would probably be better, and soybean or canola oil might be adequate) and put a light coat on the metal spindle pin. I popped it back together and tested it. Now it's silent again, almost like new!
This may only be a temporary fix. The pin looked a little worn, probably because it had been rattling not too badly for months now. Was it noisy because the lubricant had migrated way? Or had it worn out?
I don't know, but this isn't a brand new fan, so it's probably not going to last another 4 years before it needs to be lubed again or replaced entirely (assuming this notebook is in use for any purpose at that time). But it saved me $100, and I can now use my old MBP peacefully until I'm ready to get a new one. crarko adds: Obviously if you still have a warranty or AppleCare in place you should bring this to an Apple Authorized repair center to get it fixed. But, once out of warranty any repairs to the hardware can get quite expensive, so it's nice to have do-it-yourself options available. As a one time gunsmith, I can tell you that sewing machine oil or vegetable oil would be very horrible choices. Sewing machine oil will dry out, leaving a gummy residue. The same is true of vegetable oils, but they're even worse in that they often contain acids.
I've had to clean up a lot of messes left by both. Motor oil might work, but it's probably too viscous. A better cheap solution is RemOil, a gun oil found in the gun section of Wal-Mart or at a real gunshop. It's light, long-lasting, and leaves no residue. (It says its Teflon impregnated, but I doubt that's in any significant amount.) An even better solution might be an oil or evaporating medium impregnated with molybdenum disulfide.
You can find that in gunshops, machine shops, and in large quantities at motorcycle shops, often sold under the brand name DrySlide. I'll say that my experience with relubricating these little fans is that the fix is extremely temporary and that the effort to open up the machine is better matched by installing a new fan that you can get for $5-10 from Mouser or somewhere like that.
In short, I don't advise oiling at all, especially given the risk of the lubricant being slung around the internals, but if you really want to go this route, at least use a good lubricant. I'm positive someone else can chime in with a better recommendation on how to lubricate these fans. In a previous life I was a machinist and electric motor and engine remanufacturing plant owner. Learned an awful lot about lubricants. Depending on the quality of the fan, it may either have 'oilite' (oil impregnated bronze bushings) or a pair of quality micro-roller bearings. If the former, good ol' 3in1 electric motor oil (not household oil!) will work for many, many, many months (read: years) if they are henceforth kept reasonably free of dust buildup and are not overworked or under-specced for their environment.
The 3in1 oil will be easily absorbed into the porous bronze, and, as long as you let it sit for an hour or so, and wipe off any excess, you will have no sling-off worries that would just be a dirt magnet. Please note this will not cure any vibration due to seriously worn bushings, but it will allow for otherwise acceptably worn bushings to spin fee, quiet, smooth and cool. You can usually apply this kind of oil without removing the fan itself, unless it is a recessed motor-type. One would think that a specialized electric motor lubricant would be best, and if you want to spend the 10x cost, you can absolutely get a can of such from any automotive store; these are generally specialized for use in alternators and starter motors, and very often come with an extremely useful micro-needle tip to get it into the bearing itself; but most are just designed to spray-saturate and then evaporate the excess or be washed away with water. Very messy for such a tiny application. If the bearings are micro-roller type, I have been extremely successful with this product: (BG Pre-Lube Part No.
(177 mL) tube I have been using this product for two decades on electric motors and numerous other roller-bearing applications. It is honey-thick, but does not evaporate and leave any residue. I use it most on Apple Mac Pro front end fans )they seem to go the fastest) and most especially on ATi and nVidia video card GPU cooling fans.
In 2006-2009, ATi seemed to have put the most obnoxiously cheap and hard to replace fans with no adequate heat sink protection between the fan motor and the GPU itself. In addition to carefully prying loose the uber-tiny bearing seals and using a hypodermic needle to inject the BGPL, I also install.030 fiber-paper gaskets (a loose-weave cloth material) between the actual fan housing and heat sink to keep the fan from getting baked. If you can even find these fans they run well over $50 each, and won't last any longer than the originals. Anyway, be sure to work on these fans over a large, clean surface, and be prepared for the tiny (usually teflon or PVC) bearing seals/covers to want to pop off like a spring and hide better than any contact lens ever made in carpets and dark floors.
Without replacing these covers, you are dooming the fan to imminent death as they will be unable to retain the applied lubricant. Best to use a dental pick with a flat edge, and work it from the outside first, then to the inside so when it pops off, the ring will be captured by the pick; ot at least aim the fan so the seal will pop off into an area that can capture the seal (e.g., inside a large box pointed down). I’m surprised that Apple may have charged so little. It’s not that the repair is difficult (I did mine last month) – and obviously Apple buys millions of little fans so their wholesale cost per fan is extremely low – but it does require one to remove many tiny screws; and it takes time to carefully clean the heat sink fins. The job took me 45 minutes; my fan cost $53.12, brand new, delivered to New York from iFixit. I could have paid less, but iFixit posts outstanding tear-down guides online – I support them. That said, my closest Apple store is 20 minutes away; I might have paid Apple to do it had I known they charge less than $30.
New Original Cpu Cooling Fan For Mac Pro
But I enjoyed making the repair myself; and since I meticulously cleaned the inside of my MacBook (the heat sink radiator fins were choked with dust) my fan-speeds now hover much lower than before. Had I cleaned this dust a few years ago, my fan may have lasted longer than four years – it certainly would have spun slower and made less noise when it was healthy! I feel I kinda need to justify why I got Apple to do the repair for me. I did the repair myself with the original iFixit fan, but it was still noisy.?!:( Rather than go through the whole expensive and time consuming process of getting a replacement fan re-shipped (yet more import duties) I returned the iFixit fan and went to the Apple store instead. Opening up my MBP and cleaning it out was definitely an interesting/worthwhile experience - my heatsinks were equally clogged up! It just seemed silly for me to persevere when Apple were offering to do it so cheaply. Out of warranty too!
The Genius guy must've been having a good day.:).
The yesterday means that a large portion of Apple's laptops are powered by Intel 'Y' processors. The fanless 12-inch MacBook was the first to include one of these low-power chips. The new MacBook Air is the second, but this time Apple is using it quite differently. Because Apple doesn't post model numbers for the processors in its laptops, it's difficult to know what exactly is going on inside them.
This is compounded by the fact that the company now has three computers - the 12-inch MacBook, the entry-level MacBook Pro, and the new Air - in the same price range, all configurable with 'dual-core i5' processors. If you're thinking of buying one of Apple's 'cheap' laptops, it's worth knowing what makes them different from one another. Let's start with what a 'Y' processor is and isn't.
Intel's ultra-low power chips used to be labeled 'Atom,' and had a completely different architecture to its desktop and laptop processors. That didn't go very well for various reasons, so Intel gave up on Atom. To replace it, Intel essentially took the 'U-series' chips that were wildly successful in the MacBook Air and Windows Ultrabooks, slowed and trimmed them down, and created a new category of processors. They're built to sip power when compared to the U-series chips, or rather, they're built to not produce much heat, and Intel achieves that by limiting power draw. A quick aside: Depending on the chip, Intel either refers to these processors as Core M or just throws a Y somewhere in their model number.
This is infuriating. They all used to be called Core M, and so I'm just going to call them Core M for simplicity. The chips in the entry-level MacBook trio are pretty similar. All have the same basic CPU architecture, with equal core/thread counts (2 and 4, respectively) and cache sizes. They diverge slightly in featuresets, and the U-series chip in the dual-core MacBook Pro pairs with faster, less power-efficient RAM, but the main differences you'll find are in clock speeds and integrated graphics. The 12-inch MacBook comes with an m3-7Y32 in its $1,299 base configuration, or an i5-7Y54 chip at $1,399.
Despite the 'm3' and 'i5' prefixes, these are basically the same chip, tuned differently. Intel even lists them at the same suggested price on its website. The m3 has a base frequency of 1.1GHz and a max turbo frequency of 3GHz, the i5 has a base frequency of 1.2GHz, and a max turbo frequency of 3.2GHz. While I don't have two machines in front of me to test this theory, the i5 will likely increase clock speed more aggressively, but beyond that they are very similar. The new $1,199 MacBook Air hasn't been dissected yet, but it almost certainly has the i5-8210Y inside.
Also a Core M, it has a base frequency of 1.6GHz, and a max turbo frequency of 3.6GHz. It appears to be a variant of the 8200Y we've seen in convertibles like the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. Where the Air differs from both the MacBook and the XPS is in its cooling: It appears to have a fan, and this would make it a much more capable machine.
In fact, it pushes it closer in performance terms to the third laptop in Apple's lineup. The MacBook Air's fan made a brief appearance on stage yesterday. That laptop is the entry-level MacBook Pro. The $1,299 version has an i5-7360U, which has the same turbo frequency of 3.6GHz as the new Air, but runs at a base frequency of 2.3GHz. It also has Iris Plus Graphics 640, while all the chips I've mentioned till now have had UHD Graphics. Without going into too much detail, UHD Graphics are really just concerned with making sure things run smoothly, aiding in things like video decoding, while the Iris Plus Graphics will assist with multiple monitor setups and even let you play something light like Dota 2 on low settings. So, on paper, all the CPUs are dual-cores capable of hitting speeds between 3GHz and 3.6GHz.
But in reality, the three implementations are quite different. Intel has a helpful, but often misunderstood measurement to help us understand why: Thermal Design Power (TDP). Rather than being a measure of how powerful a processor is, TDP tells us how much heat it dissipates at a certain frequency. All Core M chips are rated for almost identical TDPs at the same frequencies.
Idling at 600MHz, they'll likely dissipate around 3.5W of heat, at 1.1-1.3GHz they reach 4.5W and at 1.6GHz they're all around 7W. Unfortunately, Intel doesn't publish Core M TDP figures above that, but the dual-core U-series in the MacBook Pro dissipates 15W at 2.3GHz, and given the architectural similarities, the Core M chips are likely in the same ballpark. The 12-inch MacBook. TDP is mainly useful for the manufacturers Intel sells to: It helps them to pick the right part for their device.
Apple, for example, knows that if it throws a chip that dissipates 7W of heat in a chassis that can easily shed 7W of heat, it doesn't need a fan, and that's what it did with the 12-inch MacBook. Now, everyday computing throws some curve balls - moments when you need extra power to prevent a machine from stalling - and that's why boost clocks exist. They let a chip kick up to higher speeds for as long as it can stay cool, before dropping the frequency back down. A desktop PC with a good cooler can sustain a high boost clock indefinitely. Outside of gaming laptops with giant vents, portable machines usually can't. It all depends on the cooling system the manufacturer has implemented.
When a system has no fan, though, it has a fixed limit for heat dissipation. Because of this, the 12-inch MacBook, for example, isn't actually capable of boosting to its advertised top clock in everyday operation. The lack of a fan also means ambient temperature plays an important role in performance. As I discovered at SXSW back in March, working in hot Texan sunlight can seriously degrade performance. That's because, unless you're doing literally nothing, the i5 MacBook's CPU won't be at its 1.2GHz base clock: It's almost always hovering above 1.5GHz during regular operation. In a more typical test - playing back a 4K video on YouTube in a 70-degree-fahrenheit room - the MacBook's CPU boosts up to 2.5GHz before hitting its thermal threshold (100C) and dropping down to 2GHz.
This task is fairly middle-of-the-road, and nicely illustrative of the Core M chips' inability to handle high clock speeds. The MacBook Air, however, won't have this issue to the same extent. Pairing the Core M chip with a fan completely changes the proposition. Now, this is somewhat uncharted territory, and we'll have to employ some guesswork here. I've never used a machine with this class of chip and a fan.
But with the fan running, the Air should be able to persistently run at boosted clock speeds way in excess of the MacBook, which already bests the outgoing MacBook Air in almost every performance metric. For an idea of performance, even with a fan running fairly slowly, the dual-core MacBook Pro can move away the 15W of heat its CPU produces at 2.3GHz and keep clocks steady. The fan can also increase its speed to help the CPU sustain close to its max 3.6GHz boost clock for longer if you're, for example, exporting a video file. Going on Apple's on-stage imagery, the Air's cooling system is not exactly robust: a shallow heatsink with an adjacent fan that exhausts heat below the display. But even this limited implementation of active cooling will allow the Air to perform more like the dual-core MacBook Pro than the 12-inch MacBook. A view of the new MacBook Air's ports Now, my 12-inch MacBook is a perfectly good word processor, web browser and occasional image editor.
But it can't do what my old, 2013 MacBook Air could. I abused that machine with unnecessarily heavy workloads - Premiere, InDesign, Photoshop and the like - for years. It was never massively fast, and it often sounded like it was about to hover off my desk, but it was definitely capable of ploughing through complex tasks, so long as you had the patience. Time has obviously erased the Air's performance, but despite the 'low-power' designation of the new Air's chip, it should be able to handle similar tasks with no issue. But why is Apple even using a Core M chip, if it's going to include a fan? It clearly believes that it's better to push a Core M chip up than a U-series chip down.
Most tasks you do on the MacBook Air won't require anywhere near the MacBook Pro's 2.3GHz base clock. Pairing Core M with a fan should offer the best of both worlds, if Apple has calculated its thermals right. We'll have to wait to test it for ourselves, but it's a safe bet that the Air will straddle the performance between the MacBook and the entry-level MacBook Pro. In light tasks, it should sip power like a MacBook and run silently.
For heavier workloads, it should perform similarly to the Macbook Pro. The only time you should notice a major difference between the Air and Pro is when the systems' GPUs get involved: While neither are particularly strong in that respect, the gulf between the two graphics packages is nonetheless huge. The entry-level 13-inch MacBook versus the old MacBook Air.
It should be clear by now that isn't easy. First up there's the entry-level MacBook Pro, which on paper, has more in common with the old MacBook Air than it does the other Pro machines. It has the same class of chip as the old Air, it's thin, it's light and it lasts for a long time away from an outlet. The other side of the equation is the 12-inch MacBook, whose raison d'etre is 'be very thin and light.' The price-to-performance ratio for the mini laptop is out of whack, and it's only for those that value portability above everything else. The new MacBook Air sits between the two. It deviates from Apple's original hardware blueprint for the Air, but its components are modern reimagining of what the Air stood for.
It was always intended to be an ultra-portable that can, for most people, be the only computer they need. Apple is betting that this 'low-power' chip, paired with active cooling, can do the same job as the original Air's beefier processor. We'll know soon if that bet pays off.