Lokiman's Remarks

As a fan of Micro Four Thirds system (and proud owner of Panasonic Lumix GF1 ) I was really surprised when I got my eyes on Engadget’s leaked post about new Olympus PEN E-PL1. Soon after the post was removed but I and many other were lucky enough to grab some of this sneak peak info. This new camera will be officially released tomorrow at 15:00 Tokyo time but we already know some information from its leaked full press release and photos.

So what are my impressions about this new member of m43 family? Hmmm.. quite good considering its features . We got the same relatively good performing 12MP sensor as inside E-P1/2, Olympus’s specific In Body Image Stabilization, 2.7-inch LCD screen and of course HD video capabilities together with accessory port for electronic viewfinder or external microphone. That’s nice but we got more! The real new feature is additional flash inside the body. Considering its even smaller size than E-P1/2 I find it really interesting. Remember? Olympus told us before that it was impossible to incorporate the flash into the camera body with previous models but here we got it like nothing happened.

As for these features we can see E-PL1 as something which takes the good from its predecessors and will sell it for “only” 599$ MSRP. Almost half the price of latest E-P2! It is Ridiculously better deal for me but I already got my Lumix GF1 So far it seams that IBIS can make the difference even comparing to almighty Lumix. However not everything look so nice about this camera..

The first thing to notice is its slightly cheaper body design which is in fact too plastic for my taste. Especially the back of the camera with the changed control buttons. We got new dedicated button for video recording like on GF1 but instead we lost both control dials. This is another letdown and it may definitely frustrate many people who are like me and demand direct control for aperture or other exposure settings. On the other hand I can understand the changes in design to make the camera a little bit cheaper and maybe to stop it from entering the waters of its bigger and more expensive brothers

Next thing to comment after seeing pictures is an absence of those cool nice Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17 mm f/2.8 prime lenses as a kit option. Instead we see only classic Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6 zoom lenses bundled with the new camera. It is not bad but I think that all Micro Four Thirds cameras just look great with those small primes – be it from Panasonic or Olympus. But who knows, maybe there is another option for kit lenses… we will see.

Yes, we will see more about E-PL1 tomorrow and I bet we are not aware of everything yet even with mentioned leaked info. I am prepared so Olympus be better showing something extra at its official release.

I received my new unibody MacBook Pro 13-ich few days ago. Although I find myself pretty skilled PC user ( if nobody praises you, one should praise himself ) I wondered if new machine from Apple will be able to live just by its own – without any of my additional tweaks. This seamed true until I installed Windows 7 (64-bit) for some performance tests ( read as “play some games” )…

I was able to install Windows 7 without any problems via BootCamp Assistant. I’ve chosen Left 4 Dead for my test – pretty good game, especially in multi-player. Set video to max and resolution to minimum and you got >30 FPS which was good. I started the game and finished first two levels. But then I stopped because I noticed that keyboard was like on fire. “It is overheating!” – I screamed and immediately started my research for some temperature monitor program.

I found very minimalistic application called Core Temp (my latest is v0.99.5) and tried its readings. CPU temp jumped to 95°C!!! I just couldn’t believe that my new MacBook is near its melting point. My old PC with AMD 64 3000+ was never able to go over 50°C even under heavy load conditions. I know – it’s not desktop but only a small notebook but still I care about its CPU temperature.

I searched some about this “overheating” stuff via Google but wasn’t able to find out if it is normal or not. Some users say that they don’t have such a high temperatures but some of them say complete opposite. Nothing against Apple overconfidence but I laughed after reading some of comments like these:

user eXan said:

The term “overheat” means the computer gets so hot it shuts down – then and only then you need to worry about temp. Its an Apple, after all – not some home-built computer where you need to monitor temps every second to make sure it works right.

user UltraNEO* said:

52°C is nothing to worry about. For a MBP this is perfectly normal unlike a PC user seems to worry about every single freakin degree, the Mac systems will work flawlessly right up to 100°C, and then some!!

I not familiar with MacBook’s normal temperatures but I just cant believe it’s OK to fry your hardware (be it CPU, GPU or other parts)… Now I stop with ranting and let’s move to see my other discoveries and observations.

SpeedFan (my latest is v4.40 Final) has been my long term program for monitoring temperatures and adjusting fan speed ever since I remember. However I experienced problems when using with MacBook because it was not able to fully control my fan. No readings and no speed control. But at least it monitors CPU, GPU and HDD temperature. Strange thing is that its values are slightly different (2-5°C lower) that those shown by CoreTemp. On my PC and AMD CPU, there is no difference between those two programs.

So with SpeedFan not usable for changing fan speed I searched again and found very nice discussion about this problem on Macrumors forum. There was a smart guy named Liu Zhong who posted source codes for his simple fan control program, which was then modified by Lubbos who created nice GUI app Lubbo’s MacBook Pro Fan Control (my latest is v0.1.5). You may use it as replacement for SpeedFan because it can automatically adjust fan speeds according to current temperature. There are some restrictions and catches – I think it is only 32-bit and BootCamp has to be terminated because of resource sharing problems. Another program that was mentioned is Mac/SMC Fan Control for Windows (my latest is v0.65) by race2. It is simple command line tool which is able to detect range for fan speed and then set the speed as you desire. It still has to terminate BootCamp but after setting the new value it restarts it again. You cant use it as automatic fan speed control but you have nice and simple tool to set the speed before you start playing games to max and after that change it back to normal. My values are now 72°C during game play – higher than I would like to have but I think I can live with that…for now.

Lubbos Fan Control Settings

Now back to MacOSX, Snow Leopard to be precise. My first choice for temperature monitoring program was iStat Menus (my latest is v2.0) which is shown nicely in menubar. It can monitor several values (not just temp. and fan speed) – CPU, MEM and HDD usage, LAN activity or voltages and power. However it can’t do any fan regulations at all. I still don’t know if fan speed is automatic as default under MacOSX and it really spins faster under heavy load because during my observations I found no changes of fan speed even when CPU utilization was hitting maximum and temperatures jumped sky high. Very strange indeed.

Logical move was to find a SpeedFan alternative for Snow Leopard and I first chose smcFanControl (my latest is v2.2.2) which is like MacFan in Windows and only lets you set the fan speed. You can create custom user profiles for different situations (heavy load, charging, batery only… ) Next step was to find something for fan auto control. I found FanControl (my latest is v1.2) but soon replaced with MacBook/Pro Extended Fan Control (my latest is v1.2) which is like it says – just modified version of latter. With that I have now like 35°C/2800 RPM when idle, around 54°C/4500 RPM when playing Full HD movie in VLC and 65°C/6000 RPM when 100% CPU utilization.

FanControl settings

Last but not least you may be interested in this: If you plan to uninstall FanControl permanently please follow these instructions (provided by its developer):

This should be sufficient for purging FanControl and reseting SCM but user durruti posted updated advanced instructions for replacing FanControl with smcFanControl:

So what conclusion do I provide? It is simple: Use Extended FanControl (iStatMenus for nice monitor) while in Snow Leopard and Lubbo’s Fan Control while in Windows 7. You will have nice and clean SpeedFan like solution for cool and quiet Macbook Pro. And that’s what I always wanted!

Now if you have any questions regarding this topic, please leave a comment. I hope that my post here will be somehow helpful and make your switch to Mac a bit easier I have one question for you: “What are your temperatures and fan speeds under MacOSX and/or Windows via Boot Camp?” Thank you in advance for your answers.