Curious to know if anyone else on a MacBook (or desktop Mac for that matter) has an issue with your CPU running hot to the point that your fans are going full speed the whole time you play?

My symptoms are: processor and memory utilization are normal, as in not more than 50% or so in use, in fact usually much less; fans start running at audible speeds 5-10 mins into playing and continually run until the sys cools down after I quit; CPU temp rises to above 80° C.

Additional details: I have the graphics settings maxed out. I don't experience framerate drops unless I'm flying by a huge asteroid field. My hardware is an Intel i5 core, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M. The problem occurs whether in full-screen or windowed.

I turned down the graphical demands and that did not seem to affect anything. It's mainly my CPU that is overheating, though everything is running hotter than it should, including GPU. I played a couple of years ago on a MacBook also, and think I remember having the same issue, so idk if maybe all Macs do this.

Uhhh... Those Mobile GeForce chips are kind of notorious for overheating and killing themselves.

You could try setting the frame limiter in the game's options to something like 30 or 45fps

yeah when i play VO on a macbookpro the fans go crazy and it burns my lap.

Hey guys, I have a lot of experience with this as my mbp is very crap. Try installing the program called smcfancontrol, it turns up the rpm of your fans to 4k each minimum at the maximum setting. Also, note that this isn't a problem with VO, its a problem with ALL GRAPHICALLY INTENSIVE PROGRAMS running on the mbp, and is a very well documented and extremely widespread problem.

Heres the link:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol

Simply start it up and change the preferences in the menu to the top right and set everything to max fan speed, then your mbp wont go above 60° C

EDIT:

Also, taking the battery out and just running off the power cord seems to cool the laptop down significantly

I had the same issue on my MacBook Air, it ran hot with 70-84% CPU usage and the fans running continuously. It chewed down the battery to low in less than 40 minutes. The one option I could change that made the biggest difference is the Graphics > Maximum Framerate in FPS. I reset it from 120 to 30 and CPU usage went down to 32% and battery life was much better.

Yea, mines set down to around 26, as that's like the minimum fps where the eye cannot detect any change between frames. Forgot to mention that as well. Also minimum graphic settings helps, I run in the lowest pixel ratio with all the setting turned down.

Thanks everyone. Yeah I did some googlin' about MacBooks running hot in general, and CPU fan control programs seem to be a common answer. I'll probably give that a shot.

I guess VO is the only graphically intense program I use ...it's just weird that none of my resources even hit 50% utilization. Of course, the only monitor I have for my graphics is the temp, so it could be taking a harder hit than I'm aware.

As for running w/o battery, that won't work in my case unless I want to unscrew the base of the laptop every time I play VO. :/