Chosen Solution
I’ve got a 2012 MBA 13” For over few months it started to randomly shut down - either while watching a stream, file transfer or using iMovie. While using iMovie temps were rising to 100-103c all the time when exporting movie! I’ve started with changing the battery - old one was on it’s last stretch anyway. No improvementI’ve bought a new thermal paste (Arctic Silver 5) and applied it. Not much of a changeI’ve installed software to monitor and tweak fans - this helped, but still using iMovie would raise temp to 100c with fans on max speed.4) I’ve read about heatsinks that can leak… Mine was snapped on the leg behind the vent.I’ve replaced the heatsink with a used (not snapped) one and temps are basically the same as before! My questions: Did “new” heatsink was also a leaked one?Is there any other reasons for CPU to overheat like that? Ventilator is working fine. Update (01/23/2021) Screenshots from TG Pro
Idle:
After few minutes of exporting video from iMovie (system fan settings):
Your system is fighting its self! It does not have the needed resources for what you are trying to do. This gets into two areas too little RAM (system only has 4GB) so the system needs to use Virtual RAM to make up the difference leveraging the SSD. But, your SSD is too full (128GB with only 55GB free)! So it needs to constantly free up space for the next block of data it is processing (rendering here). Unlike HDD’s, SSD’s have a limited number of writes per block. This SSD is getting worn so wear leveling is kicking in hard! Even though you have a fair amount of free space on the drive you really need a new drive. As a rule of thumb smaller SSD’s like yours a minimum of 1/3 of it should be free and larger SSD need 1/3 and the very large 2TB 1/4 free. But processing images and video rendering really taxes the system much harder and the larger project even more! The amount of data churn then can hit you as its doing here. The short term solution is clean off your SSD to give your system more free space to run on. Use an external drive to hold your work, only having your OS and apps on your internal drive. Depending on the app see if you can put the scratch space onto the external to lessen the stress on your internal SSD given is current state. Frankly, I would look at getting a bigger SSD (500GB ~ 1TB) as the first action. Upgrading your logic board to 8 GB of RAM would be even better with the bigger SSD. But, given the age of this system it might be wiser and cheaper getting a newer MacBook Air used which has a better CPU, still more RAM (16GB) and a 1TB SSD.
