2024 suggestions for fan control on Intel Mac hardware?

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Billiam29

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  • #1
    I was just wondering if anyone has any current feedback on suggested packages for controlling the fans on Intel Macs running Linux. My particular use case is a mid-2011 Macmini5,2 .

    My research on this subject has yielded a whole fuzzy spectrum of results, most of which are fairly old. Even some of these old search hits refer to multiple packages and/or some of the packages no longer being supported. Not to mention, I’m guessing it’s at least plausible the suggested solutions for Macbooks could be different than those for iMacs or the Minis.

    FWIW I replaced the hard drive in my 2011 Mini with a SATA SSD. I have no recollection of doing anything with a temperature sensor cable. I’m not sure sure if that’s beacause I accomodated it or my era Mini didn’t have one. Regardless, I never experienced any “leaf blower” fan problems from the SSD swap so that’s not something I need to accommodate now with the machine on Mint 21.3.
     
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    Billiam29

    Ars Scholae Palatinae
    685
  • #3
    Things seem to now be at a thermal state that’s probably in line with expectations for my system.

    An hour or two after my Mint OS install the system was getting fairly warm to the touch just driving the UI and using its various included applications for tweaking their preferences. Nothing that should have put any meaningful load on the CPU or GPU.

    After I posted here, I did see reference to lm-sensors and confirmed that Mint had installed it out of the box. I ran the sensors-detect script and let it install a module it thought was necessary. Afterwards, the “exhaust” fan on the Mini shows as spinning and the system has not since got as warm to the touch as I previously mentioned. I’m not 100% certain if this is what did the trick because I stupidly never actually looked at the sensors readings before I ran the detect script.

    With all this in mind, the system still seems to be idling in the 70-75c range which seems hot to me. Conversely, my gut is telling me this may actually be within expectations for a 13 year old Mac Mini running something other than macOS.

    I guess I was just getting confused by the shear number of individual packages I found mentioned: macfanctrl, smcfancontrol, mbpfan, etc… Those, combined with the initial heat I was feeling, was telling me I needed to install something Mac-specific for thermals. It seems that may not be the case. Time will tell I guess.
     
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