MacBook Pro heats up crazy while playing games

Question

Hello all;
I know the heating up issue has been raised several times all over the internet. But none of the discussions  has satisfied my the concerns I have with my system. So I am going to put my case a new, although I believe the answers are going to be the same as on other similar discussions.
I recently bought MacBook Pro (15 inch, 2.2 GHz, late 2011, OS X Lion) and also I am new to Mac. The system usually runs perfectly. I just have two issues:
i. Occassionally it freezes up when more then one apps are running. I have noticed this is usually when Firefox is running in the background. Also happened with Safari a couple of times.
But my main concern and query is the point no. ii (below)
ii. During the normal usuage the fans don't make a noise (even with multiple apps that are not burden on the RAM). The systems heat up is as normal as that of a PC while running on its normal situation. However, when I play games (like BioShock, Sims etc) Mac just heats up immensly and fans kick in. I have never seen/felt a computer get this hot before.
How do I fix this?

Answer 1

u235pu239 wrote:
i. Occassionally it freezes up when more then one apps are running. I have noticed this is usually when Firefox is running in the background. Also happened with Safari a couple of times.
I know Firefox has a slight issue with the way it handles RAM, so does Chrome, it has to do with the add-ons and how the unused RAM gets returned for using for another program.
Safari might have a memory leak, it also could be now with 64 bit everyone is rushing out to grab as much RAM as they can, trying to turn their browsers into platforms.
After all, if you think about it, browsers are becoming so powerful that they can actually run software within them, so perhaps Apple is messing with Chrome and Firefox's memory so they can't grow too large and takeover?  Just my thoughts.
ii. During the normal usuage the fans don't make a noise (even with multiple apps that are not burden on the RAM). The systems heat up is as normal as that of a PC while running on its normal situation. However, when I play games (like BioShock, Sims etc) Mac just heats up immensly and fans kick in. I have never seen/felt a computer get this hot before.
3D games (or anything 3D) works the graphics and if you have a dedicated video card (the 15" does, the 13" does not) then that heats up too, thus the fans go up.
CPU intensive programs will heat up the processors and the fans go up.
Mac's come with Intel processors and they come with integrated graphics which performs some graphics capability, but can't handle 3D very well at all.
So the way the Mac works with a dedicated video card is it uses the integrated graphics on the CPU for as much as it can then hands off to the dedicated video card.
What you can do is open your System Preferences > Energy Saver and turn off graphics switching, that will use your dedicated video card only, located separately from the CPU and thus concentrate less heat on one spot on the logicboard, you should have a cooler machine.
However 3D gaming will of course always heat the machine up, perhaps a lot less as your not using the  integrated graphics which is lousy anyway.
Another issue is 3D games are usually produced for a specific OS version and they milk it, perhaps don't see the value of making a update that works with a new OS X version, rather concentrating efforts on the next version of the game.
So it's ideal to only run games that are designed for the OS X version your using. Which Apple changes the OS version often, now once a year with 10.8 coming out this summer, why there isn't a whole lot of 3D games for the Mac, not to mention you can't find or upgrade video card like on a Windows tower.
So with 3D games, OS stability (Windows remains the same for 10 years) AND the option to replace the video card is paramount.
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