2-14-03
There has been a lot of debate going back and forth on just how hot the new 12 inch PowerBook G4/867 gets. Namely Applelinks has been giving the issue a lot of coverage. So we thought we would shed a little light on the heat issue by taking the temperature of our test machine. Was our new PowerBook too hot, too cold or just right ..
In this picture the temperature is taken under heavy operational stress. There is a fractal being rendered in the background (hard to see because of the camera flash glare), two QuickTime movies are playing off the hard drive and there is a DVD playing from the internal Combo Drive. The processor is completely maxed out, however all 4 items are progressing smoothly (explain to me again why you don't want to give up OS 9?).
The temperature of the hand rest is taken on the left side. This is the side that gets the warmest and is where I believe the hard drive is housed. We used a indoor/outdoor thermometer to take the temperature and used a mouth thermometer to gauge the accuracy of our test thermometer .. it was within 1 degree. The top number is the time .. so you can ignore that. The second number is the surface temperature of the PowerBook which fluctuated between 99 and 100 degrees (37C) .. not exactly third degree burn inducing.
Next we took the temperature of the bottom of the PowerBook.
We put the PowerBook through the same testing setup as in the first test above and let the sensor cook a good while.
The result, not surprising, was more heat. The temperature was between 113 and 114 degrees (45C). Somewhat uncomfortable on the lap but not enough to scorch the top of your desk.
Finally we decided to see what kind of heat was generated when the PowerBook was doing more light duty.
Here we have Microsoft Word open and the PowerBook just sitting there waiting for someone to start typing. This is the kind of load that you would put on your computer if you were doing word processing or some other light duty tasks.
As you can see the temperature dropped down to a comfortable 90 degrees (32C).
On a cold winter night all you need is to curl up with your thermal radiating PowerBook and watch the snow fall.
Conclusion: Seems to us that the temperature of our machine is in the normal range for PowerBook temperatures. The hand rest area is warm .. but it is not hot or exceptionally uncomfortable. The bottom gets hotter but is not hotter than the Titanium PowerBooks we have tested. There has been some speculation that some of the 12 inch PowerBooks run hotter than others. We are kind of skeptical of this and think that is more likely that the sensitivity of PowerBook owners is the changing variable. However if someone takes the temperature of their PowerBook that they claim is hot enough to fry an egg on .. send us the pictures and we will publish them.
Think we have brought more heat than light to the issue? Let us know!
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