Zbrush (Mac) CPU Usage
Hey everyone.
So, I just got a Macbook Retina 15" (The one with the 750m in it) and tried out Zbrush.
Doing anything at all maxes out the CPU and the fans scream like a jet engine...
I read that a few people having this problem, but the solution is to turn the max CPU cores available down to 1 or 2.
Whilst this helps, it of course slows down Zbrush, as it only has 1 or two cores to work with - Not ideal.
Anyone found a better fix for this?
Cheers!
So, I just got a Macbook Retina 15" (The one with the 750m in it) and tried out Zbrush.
Doing anything at all maxes out the CPU and the fans scream like a jet engine...
I read that a few people having this problem, but the solution is to turn the max CPU cores available down to 1 or 2.
Whilst this helps, it of course slows down Zbrush, as it only has 1 or two cores to work with - Not ideal.
Anyone found a better fix for this?
Cheers!
Replies
One thing you could try is to change the fan behavior to run at a higher min RPM, the fan will be louder all the time but it may be less prone to getting really hot and needing to go on full blast. I do this, but really when I'm doing heavy work, the fans are going full blast, not really anything you can do about it other than use a desktop instead of a laptop.
I use smcFanControl
OP: are you sure limiting the CPU threads is a noticeable performance bottleneck? as i recall there's a multithreading test integrated in zbrush. might want to compare running on 2 and 4 threads using that.
my guess is that as soon as the computer is being stressed proper and starts heating up, it will throttle the CPU anyway. if it does that at least in Lion/Mountain Lion it will spawn a process called 'kernel_task' that stalls the CPU until it has cooled down enough and will show you a nice animated beachball for your viewing pleasure.
btw messing about with the SMC may lead to a really confused system operating on all the wrong power management data a few months down the road. check your kernel/system logs occasionally for SMC related warnings regularly. i never messed with fan speeds either, just had a widget reporting system temp, that's all it took.
beachball at the strangest of times, trouble waking or sleeping. it needs resetting then (key combo held down at startup).
btw. MBP will in my experience only run warm to the touch in normal usage if you are stressing the discrete GPU a lot. switch to the integrated one and it's all cool. not that it would help much with zbrush in this case.