I have been using my hackintosh to render video and render models in sketchup. It has had me kinda stressed out because at stock speeds it has been getting up to ~70 C and running for 20 to 30 hours at a go at that temp. It peaked as high as 80 C at one point when I was tinkering with mild overclocking. I put it back to stock real fast when I saw that These temps are as reported by Temperature Monitor (Marcel Bresink Software) on a Core 2 E6700 in 10.4.9.

OK, so I installed the Arctic 7 Pro cooler and I am exporting Sketchup right now and CPU 1 and 2 are both reporting 55 C under full load. This is an easy 10 to 12 C drop in temp. I know the big CPU towers (tuniq tower etc.) cool even better but I wanted a low cost no-motherboard-removal solution, which this is. It just snaps in place of the stock cooler. It is quieter than stock too I think, but my RAID cage makes a lot of noise so it is hard to tell how much quieter.


Just thought I would share since a lot of people have been wondering about heat and Core 2 procesors with their hackintoshes.


*update-- I went ahead and overclocked it to 3.1 GHz from stock 2.6 and it is sitting ~60 C on both cores under full load. My test file dropped from a render time of 41 hours at stock speed to 36 hours. That's sweet, and still about 5 C below where I was at stock speeds on stock cooler.

Temperature Monitor doesn't seem to give accurate core temp readings all the time, if you have windows installed i would double check your temps using peecee software.

You can also download an Terminal app named thermo made by one of our own (who's name escapes me at the moment). It will show you your "CPU" temp which is the temp of the cpu heat spreader. From there you can add 15 degrees to approximate what your core temps are. The cores always run 15 degrees celsius (+/- 2) hotter than the heat spreader.

That was how i deciphered that Temperature Monitor was offsetting my core readings by about 15-20 extra degrees. It was very disconcerting to have my 6420 report that it was at 65+ when idle. Especially since all the temps in BIOS Setup and Windows appeared fine.