Zbrush (Mac) CPU Usage

edwardsomatic

Hey everyone.

So, I just got a Macbook Retina 15" (The one with the 750m in it) and tried out Zbrush.
Doing anything at all maxes out the CPU and the fans scream like a jet engine...

I read that a few people having this problem, but the solution is to turn the max CPU cores available down to 1 or 2.
Whilst this helps, it of course slows down Zbrush, as it only has 1 or two cores to work with - Not ideal.

Anyone found a better fix for this?
Cheers!

Cube Republic

Not sure if this is an issue? If you're using a lot of CPU resources as I'd expect zbrush to, then the machine will get hot. Think about the enormous heatsinks on desktop CPUs compared to a laptop.

EarthQuake

Macbook Pros are tuned for quiet fan usage, this means by default they run HOT. If you're doing something really CPU extensive, it will likely heat up and then turn the fans on full blast.

One thing you could try is to change the fan behavior to run at a higher min RPM, the fan will be louder all the time but it may be less prone to getting really hot and needing to go on full blast. I do this, but really when I'm doing heavy work, the fans are going full blast, not really anything you can do about it other than use a desktop instead of a laptop.

I use smcFanControl

thomasp

as i recall, zbrush 4+ was going full blast on MBP pretty much the second you opened it. you could just let it sit in the foreground, do nothing and fry an egg on the laptop case. and i distinctively remember that CPU hogging not being an issue in 3.12 or thereabouts - earliest OSX port i think is what it was.

OP: are you sure limiting the CPU threads is a noticeable performance bottleneck? as i recall there's a multithreading test integrated in zbrush. might want to compare running on 2 and 4 threads using that.

my guess is that as soon as the computer is being stressed proper and starts heating up, it will throttle the CPU anyway. if it does that at least in Lion/Mountain Lion it will spawn a process called 'kernel_task' that stalls the CPU until it has cooled down enough and will show you a nice animated beachball for your viewing pleasure.

btw messing about with the SMC may lead to a really confused system operating on all the wrong power management data a few months down the road. check your kernel/system logs occasionally for SMC related warnings regularly. i never messed with fan speeds either, just had a widget reporting system temp, that's all it took.
beachball at the strangest of times, trouble waking or sleeping. it needs resetting then (key combo held down at startup).

btw. MBP will in my experience only run warm to the touch in normal usage if you are stressing the discrete GPU a lot. switch to the integrated one and it's all cool. not that it would help much with zbrush in this case.