I’ve got a concern here… I just baked a lightmap for a few objects using 1 directional light and a few point lights (nothing fancy). While rendering, I was shocked to see that my CPU temperature reached a record 101 degrees C!!! A few more minutes like this and I could seriously damage my CPU or any other component. Not even Maya’s Mental Ray allows this extremes… I blame it on the Beast render… since it also uses 100% of my 2 core CPU. Any way of controlling this?
By the way, I’m using a 2.53 GHz MacbookPro 2009 model, 4G ram.
You can’t control it, at least not from within unity, the rendering is meant to use 100% so it finishes in reasonable times.
What mental ray does or does not is up to their devs, but in neither case its a problem with the software but the hardware you use and what you use it for.
notebooks aren’t really designed for permanent 100% cpu usage even less apples that are well known for more or less serious termal problems if they are used what the hw was designed for I fear …
so the problem is isn’t a problem by unity but by the hardware design of apple as the “anticipate only medium to low longer term usage” (common usage pattern for notebook), while you use it as if you had a macpro with multifan / watercooling
you can lower the problem commonly with fan plates you put bellow that help pulling away heat.
or you can look in the console manual if you find a way to restrict unity to a single core (on windows its called cpu affinity and settable through the process manager)
If Mental Ray isn’t using 100% of all your CPUs, maybe it’s bad configured, 'cause no renderer in the world will monitor the CPU temperature to prevent anything.
Also, if your system isn’t overclocked and the ambient temperature is “normal” (let’s say <25°C) you definatively have a hardware problem… maybe the ventilation holes are obstructed or the fan isn’t working very well.
It’s no ordinary notebook, so i would get a refund if the problem is what dreamora said. For that price i would expect nothing less than a server-stable notebook. Never saw any notebook at that price range with temperature problems (okay, after a bios update, and not counting those HPs), even rendering an entire day.
Also, any kind of permanent damage is very unlikely to happen.
You can try to change the process priority to something lower.
In a certain cases, mental ray would use 100% of the CPU, but that wouldn’t cause it to reach 100 degrees C on my laptop. Overall, I think that macbook laptops aren’t the best for intense 3D tasks (such as lightmap baking).
i think you found the reason for your issue… most laptops have really cruddy cooling systems (which is why a lot of them are underclocked.)
that and it’s a mabookc? not trying to hate on macs but they’re not the most well-built laptops around. if you can, go to a tower PC or MAC if you can. they usually have much better cooling systems in them that running your CPU at 100% shouldn’t risk thermal damage.
