Jul 17, '08 07:30:01AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
We take great care to ensure that our systems run with reasonable temperatures as that helps extend their lifetimes. We've used various applications to control the fan speeds on different systems but, with the upgrade to 10.5, our Intel-based iMac was left without a fan-control solution that worked adequately. To that end, I decided to modify the open source (GPL) FanControl to work with our iMac. The result is that I've generated two new versions of Fan Control, one for the Intel-based iMacs and one for the MacBook/MacBook Pro.
These versions also have some extended control capabilities over the original FanControl. The iMac version uses separate sensors to drive the control of each of its three fans. The MacBook/MacBook Pro version allows use of the CPU and/or GPU temperatures to drive the fans. (The GPU-based operation can be useful if you play games.) There are some other minor enhancements, noted in the Read Me file.
I've also tried to make it easy for anyone who might want to modify the source code and adapt it to other systems ... e.g., to generate a version for the Mac Pro that uses different sensors to control different fans (or groups of fans). Hope this is useful to others.
[robg adds: I tested the MacBook Pro version, and it worked well. Another open-source fan control option is smcFanControl, a previous Pick of the Week selection.]
