Tip:  Display brightness affects iMac temperature

Not a question, just a useful tip for anyone concerned about the temperature of their iMac G5. The brightness of the LCD display can signnificantly affect temperatures inside the machine. So if you are reading high temperatures in your iMac, or the fans are running at higher speeds than you'd like, try going into System Preferences/Displays and adjusting the screen brightness down to the dimmest you can handle. It will take a while to take effect (as the machine needs to cool) but there will be a noticable difference over time.
This may also reduce eye-fatigue (provided you don't set it too low.
I was told by an Apple Tech that the reason for this is that the LCD is lit by powerful neon bulbs that output a lot of heat directly next to all of the other components in the machine, so dimming the brightness reduces this heat-output somewhat.

I have to say, nice tip! I dimmed my iMac's brightness down to the lowest it would go. In about a minute the CPU temp dropped a good seven degrees Celsius.
Now I'll test it at 50% brightness.

Similar Messages

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    This hint is for all of you who experience any problem with the adjustment of the display brightness.
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    It seems to be, that the adjustment of the display brightness of an iMac and MacBook/Pro (maybe also other models are affected) drives a life of its own. After a cold and/or warm start, it sometimes happens that the brightness was changed by the system itself to its dim power saver setting or maximum value and sometimes - what a big surprise - remains as it has been configured.
    I had spotted plenty of articles about this phenomenon, but only found terms like "Did you already disabled the ambient light sensor", "Did you already reset the PRAM?", "Did you already reset the NVRAM?", "Did you already…BLAH". Far from it, all of these tips have one thing in common: none of them yielded a solution. As a last resort, I thought, it was a good idea to install 10.6 from the scratch just to find out that the above mentioned phenomenon occurs right after a few days of using OS X.
    I then decided to solve this problem by going the pragmatically way and use some kind of software which dims the display to my preferred setting. There are a few applications to do this, but always it was necessary to drag a slider or type in a value to dim the display, so none of them allowed an automatic configuration. No, I am not a very sophisticated person, I only prefer to use software which is simply well-thought-out. And the winner is: brightness.
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    <false/>
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    Thanks. Works great. I made a ScriptBundle and a User Agent (launchd) . So if someone sets the display brightness to maximum, it automaticaly corrects it at next login.
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  • How do i set up a second display for my iMac desktop?  I want to use both displays at the same time.

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  • I have a 27" thunderbolt display NOT the iMac, and I'm trying to connect my xbox 360 to it via the Belkin AV360. I plug everything in and it does not work? I check all the power cables and and connections and still not he issue. Iv'e tried C-F2 also. Help

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