Typing this on a phone (for obvious reasons) so it ll be the short version.
Been a warm day here (30°c). Been running Unreal Engine 4.8.1 all day.
Of course I noticed my fans being very active to keep everything cool (nothing abnormal. happens when I do video editing too)
End of the day now it seems the left fan took a bigger hit than I anticipated cause all of a sudden it started making a noise straight out of hell.
Made a short vid:
I m just here to warn people I guess to keep an eye on your workstation when running heavy processes like UE4 cause it can really affect ur hardware when the stress has been too high for too long.
A quick check of my running processes showed that Unreal Engine was using up to 600% cpu. (not constantly . the 600% extremes happened especially during lightmass calculations in build phase)
Possibly this 600% was an indication of something that had gone terribly wrong somewhere inside UE4, or are people experiencing these cpu spikes too?
Yes I know I should have checked this sooner but like I said. I was expecting some elevated fan-activity and the noise during the day wasnt abnormal and similar to the noise I get when doing video editing.
I ll get it checked out first thing Monday and come back here to report on the verdict.
Does this beg the question: are macbooks/laptops equipped to run heavy processes like these for prolonged periods of time? (have a friend that fried his macbook running After Effects rendering huge files for an entire day) or have I just been very unlucky with a rogue process keeping my cpu so heigh for so long without me noticing?
not overclocking.
had a few UE crashes during the day. I m guessing some of those processes got stuck and caused the cpu to go crazy.
I want to make clear that I m not saying: Using UE on a macbook will kill ur machine. I m only saying. keep an eye on your fans and processes cause you really CAN damage ur hardware.
mid to high end laptops can usually handle it but low end laptops and macbooks not so much, you could always use a cooling stand to try and help take the load off your fans, they usually work quite well, I don’t need to use my cooling stand because my has really good cooling but I did test it and it worked pretty well.
maybe but there is no way to tell for sure, it could have been any number of things.
I have the same problem here in my room -> whenever I have over 35° in my room, my PC has a very hard time to stay cold. In my case this happens with every type of performance heavy programs -> The Witcher 3, UE4,… (but will get a water cooling system when I will upgrade my GPU)
Currently running UE4 on my Asus Gamers Republic G73 with GTX460M (the “M” stands for: Maybe I’m half as good as the desktop version of this graphics card.)
Too afraid to boot my macbook again - will go to macstore first thing tomorrow.
Do you monitor your temps? It’s a good idea to do that when developing, as well as gaming. Some programs such as EVGA’s Precision X allow you to put your fan speed % and temp in the taskbar so you can always keep an eye on it. Hope you will be able to salvage as much as you can from it.
600% just means that 3 cores, 2 threads per core were running at 100% capacity.
This kind of CPU usage is generally normal as UE4 is pretty resource heavy, especially when using UnrealLightmass and if the scene is complex it would render for a while.
Having said that, is your MBP still working, but just making that noise? It’s probably a fan that needs to be replaced which is relatively a cheap fix compared to a motherboard replacement.
UE4 will tax the system to the almost always, and especially in OS X and Linux, so is not the ideal platform for development, or heavy rendering.
That’s the first thing I installed when I heard that noise from hell
So , no I wasn’t monitoring anything up until now.
Went to Apple service today.
Of course the dude told me it was just a silly coincidence … had nothing to do with the heat or any heavy lifting I was doing on my macbook (UE4 -> I told him this, he probably didn’t know what it was either)
So , what was broken was the motor that powers the left fan … + there was also a truckload of dust in the fan.
Macbook is now in for repair, not sure about the cost yet.
Still think there’s an absolute correlation between the heavy lifting and the fan motor giving up. (macbook is exactly 2 years old) … I’m just not that lucky that this is just a coincidence.
I have UE4 currently running fine on my ASUS laptop
I fix computers by trade and it seems like the fan is hitting something. I can’t really tell, but we can troubleshoot the laptop.
I have a MBP as well, and I have opened it up to clean the fans(it was causing stuttering on my games, even 2009 games).
Do you smell anything burning, that’s a sure fire way it’s fried. Also, can you boot to BIOS(MACs version BIOS)?