Swtor crashing on macbook air

[BroadbentJeremy]

I recently installed SWTOR on my 2012 MacBook air i7 1.7Ghz(2.3Ghz Turbo boost), 8GB RAM, intel graphics HD 5000, via Bootcamp. I am running Windows 10 64bit. I played the game fine for about a week or so with all settings on high, without shading of course. But yesterday the game started crashing on me- Windows was shutting it down when the processor hit 90C. I tried lowering graphics to all low settings, and waited for the machine to completely cool down, and have now tried playing several times. As soon as it loads to where my player was on Ziost it shuts off. very frustrating. I can't hear fans coming on, and I know they were running continually before. Anyway to Manually turn them on in Windows? Confused as to why it was working wrong before, and now has stopped. The computer seems to be working fine otherwise.

[Eillack]

MacBook Air.

 

There's one of the issues.

[BroadbentJeremy]

WOW! fast reply, Thanks for trolling with your Apple Hate, but I'm looking for real solutions

[dexoforce]

TBH, what he said was not too far from the truth, although I don't particularly condone his word choice there.

 

From the looks of your CPU temps, I assume the system crashed due to severe thermal-throttling, partly on the fault of manufacturer which is Apple here. Why the MacBook Air has so limited cooling is beyond me, but the reason why your computer crashed most likely was the thermal throttling, which lowered your CPU clock speed, and turn caused the game to freeze up; ending up in a system crash.

 

Now I'm not quite familiar with what been going with SWTOR patches and what-not lately, but my guess is either that or any system changes (installing new programs, updates, etc.) that you've done in the past week. Or, it could be a sign of hardware failure (fans perhaps stopped working? or something wrong with the CPU or internal motherboard?).

 

Have you been monitoring your system temps before this started happening? Heat is the worst thing that can affect your MacBook's hardware (aside from water of course); there is a likely chance that it was running at high temps causing some hardware failure of some sort (as noted above).

 

EDIT: Noted that you mentioned 'manually' turning on the fans; sorry, but that's actually not possible, unless you have a fan controller and access to it (which Apple sadly does not install on their laptops, but I doubt it actually exists on any other laptops)

 

If you can't diagnose any other issues by yourself, I would say it's a good time to call Apple or a repair shop.

Edited February 3, 2016 by dexoforce

[Eillack]

WOW! fast reply, Thanks for trolling with your Apple Hate, but I'm looking for real solutions

 

Sorry that you are too sensitive to know that any Mac should not be used for gaming. It's highly inefficient.

 

But if you want to be salty, go for it. The forums can use a good laugh.

[BroadbentJeremy]

TBH, what he said was not too far from the truth, although I don't particularly condone his word choice there.

 

From the looks of your CPU temps, I assume the system crashed due to severe thermal-throttling, partly on the fault of manufacturer which is Apple here. Why the MacBook Air has so limited cooling is beyond me, but the reason why your computer crashed most likely was the thermal throttling, which lowered your CPU clock speed, and turn caused the game to freeze up; ending up in a system crash.

 

Now I'm not quite familiar with what been going with SWTOR patches and what-not lately, but my guess is either that or any system changes (installing new programs, updates, etc.) that you've done in the past week. Or, it could be a sign of hardware failure (fans perhaps stopped working? or something wrong with the CPU or internal motherboard?).

 

Have you been monitoring your system temps before this started happening? Heat is the worst thing that can affect your MacBook's hardware (aside from water of course); there is a likely chance that it was running at high temps causing some hardware failure of some sort (as noted above).

 

EDIT: Noted that you mentioned 'manually' turning on the fans; sorry, but that's actually not possible, unless you have a fan controller and access to it (which Apple sadly does not install on their laptops, but I doubt it actually exists on any other laptops)

 

If you can't diagnose any other issues by yourself, I would say it's a good time to call Apple or a repair shop.

 

Thanks. I installed a fan controller that seems to be helping, but the game crashed again when I left the game to look at temperatures. Everything else seems to be fine. Lets hope no damage has been done.

[dexoforce]

I'm surprised you got one to work, never had any luck myself unfortunately. (Mind sharing what you installed, BTW?)

 

Did you hear some fan noise when running SWTOR? (And for curiosity sake, what is the idle temperature of your MacBook? (no programs running, idle on the desktop) FYI it may be high, don't be too surprised considering the cooling solutions that this laptop has. But I would be concerned if they're similar to what you have when running the game, which tells me something about the cooling is definitely off, or some other program is running in the background)

[BroadbentJeremy]

I'm surprised you got one to work, never had any luck myself unfortunately. (Mind sharing what you installed, BTW?)

 

Did you hear some fan noise when running SWTOR? (And for curiosity sake, what is the idle temperature of your MacBook? (no programs running, idle on the desktop) FYI it may be high, don't be too surprised considering the cooling solutions that this laptop has. But I would be concerned if they're similar to what you have when running the game, which tells me something about the cooling is definitely off, or some other program is running in the background)

 

this is what i installed, seems to work well

http://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

 

idle temperature seems to be around 55-60C

 

I was wondering if something may be running in the background that may be affecting things, but the only thing I have installed is the Temperature monitor I have, (and now the fan control) I don't really have anything else as I only installed windows to play this game, and for the first week or so it worked way better then the old PC laptop I had even when playing for Hrs at a time on high settings.

 

Thanks for your help

[MadDutchman]

Honestly it sounds like you burnt/melted something in the cooling system when it overheated the first time, which is why it overheats regularly now.

 

You could try using a cooling pad... though if the cooling is shot that may not make much difference.

 

And for the future, if you want to play games, buy a desktop if it is at all financially feasible.

[BroadbentJeremy]

Thanks for your help. Honestly I realize it's not the best machine to run games on, but I have had this MacBook since before I started playing this game, which is the only game I play. I don't really have the money to dump into a gaming setup right now, and the Mac seemed at first to do a much better job then the ancient Laptop I had. I did a lot of research before going to the trouble of installing Windows on it. A lot of people play games on Mac's with no problems, and plenty of people have issues with there PC's. I didn't really want to start yet another debate about it. But I do appreciate the good straight forward advice. One thing I don't think about is that laptops in general have heating issues , and the MacBook Air is especially bad offender in that regard. Hopefully I can get it straightened out.

[FlyingUsPoo]

Issues that stand out to me from your description:

 

1) Intel HD 5000. Even getting this to work, you are going to need extra memory to get it to work smoothly. I have 32GB of memory and have to push at least 4GB over to just that card to get anything to run remotely smooth. Even when you get it running with a load of resources behind it, it still looks like crap. You should be able to allocate memory in the bios (if you can at all).

 

2) That video chip is on the CPU silicone. You are going to push the heat thru the roof. Apple (like most other manufactures) may have used thermal pads, not thermal paste. Those pads are crap for heat transfer. The older they are the crappier they are. If they did use paste, it would need replaced every couple of years anyway because it dries out and gets inefficient. Best bet, pull it apart and replace the pads/thermal paste with new paste.

 

3) MacBook Air isn't designed for 3D games. It has passive cooling, not active cooling. That little fan isn't up to the task to keep everything cooled down. You'll need another option to take up the slack.

Edited February 3, 2016 by FlyingUsPoo

[ninjonxb]

Sorry that you are too sensitive to know that any Mac should not be used for gaming. It's highly inefficient.

 

But if you want to be salty, go for it. The forums can use a good laugh.

 

Using a Mac for gaming is just fine, just not a Macbook Air.

Macbook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro lines are all built to do heavy graphics lifting (under Mac and not Windows however).

The issue here is that the Air is simply not designed for graphics intensive work, made worse by running the game under Windows where it is not fully optimized to use the hardware unlike a game running natively on Mac.

 

Sorry I know this is not helpful for the OP, but I get very annoyed when people jump at all mac's not being good for gaming.

I use a macbook pro when I game away from home (with a bootcamp partition).

[teclado]

Yeah, SWTOR (being a very CPU heavy game) is going to kill that poor thing. Obviously, 90C is not too far from the boiling point of water, and 100C is typically the TJ Max (point at which you very well may damage your chip). Intel's Core series of chips will throttle their own clock rate when the temps get close to that, so I doubt that you actually damaged the chip.

 

For SWTOR, I think that 1.7-2.3GHz is actually very much on the low side. Having multiple cores doesn't really help much for this game, what matters is the single core performance. Lowering the graphics setting actually may work your CPU even harder, if it is the bottleneck. Since your graphics processor is integrated into your CPU, it may not matter what your graphics settings are in terms of CPU temperature.

 

If you happen to know what the temps were prior to when you started having issues, that might shed some light on what happened.

 

It does seem odd that everything was working fine for a week. Maybe something with a recent patch, something to do with Ziost? Maybe you have two separate issues that have similar symptoms?

 

I know that when I run SWTOR on my small-ish Sony Vaio laptop, it gets pretty warm and the fans go into turbo mode after a few minutes. That's just the nature of having something that generates a lot of heat being cooled only by a small piece of metal and some air, and being packed in tightly with other warm components. Bulk and weight vs cooling tradeoff. If you have a walk-in freezer, you could bundle up and play in there. Or if you live in the north. That should help, with an extremely low ambient temperature.

 

Oh, and it is possible that some dust and other debris is clogging up the cooling system and minimizing its effectiveness. Not too long ago my dad's computer had a really loud fan, all the time, and the vid card temps were rather high. I pulled out the video card, disassembled the fan unit, and sure enough there was a ton of dust caked on. After some fun with the air compressor, I put everything back together and viola - temps were much lower, and the fan was whisper quiet.

Edited February 3, 2016 by teclado

[BroadbentJeremy]

Using a Mac for gaming is just fine, just not a Macbook Air.

Macbook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro lines are all built to do heavy graphics lifting (under Mac and not Windows however).

The issue here is that the Air is simply not designed for graphics intensive work, made worse by running the game under Windows where it is not fully optimized to use the hardware unlike a game running natively on Mac.

 

Sorry I know this is not helpful for the OP, but I get very annoyed when people jump at all mac's not being good for gaming.

I use a macbook pro when I game away from home (with a bootcamp partition).

 

Thank you! I just knew as soon as I posted someone would bash Apple, but it does seem that the comment against MacBook Airs may be more correct then I wanted to believe. now that I think of it, most of what I read was pertaining to MacBook Pros. I thought that since my air doesn't have the retina display, it might take less to drive it, but I am somewhat ignorant when it comes to this stuff.

 

Do you mind me asking, What are the Specs on your pro, and How do you deal with any heating issues?

Thanks

[BroadbentJeremy]

Yeah, SWTOR (being a very CPU heavy game) is going to kill that poor thing. Obviously, 90C is not too far from the boiling point of water, and 100C is typically the TJ Max (point at which you very well may damage your chip). Intel's Core series of chips will throttle their own clock rate when the temps get close to that, so I doubt that you actually damaged the chip.

 

For SWTOR, I think that 1.7-2.3GHz is actually very much on the low side. Having multiple cores doesn't really help much for this game, what matters is the single core performance. Lowering the graphics setting actually may work your CPU even harder, if it is the bottleneck. Since your graphics processor is integrated into your CPU, it may not matter what your graphics settings are in terms of CPU temperature.

 

If you happen to know what the temps were prior to when you started having issues, that might shed some light on what happened.

 

It does seem odd that everything was working fine for a week. Maybe something with a recent patch, something to do with Ziost? Maybe you have two separate issues that have similar symptoms?

 

I know that when I run SWTOR on my small-ish Sony Vaio laptop, it gets pretty warm and the fans go into turbo mode after a few minutes. That's just the nature of having something that generates a lot of heat being cooled only by a small piece of metal and some air, and being packed in tightly with other warm components. Bulk and weight vs cooling tradeoff. If you have a walk-in freezer, you could bundle up and play in there. Or if you live in the north. That should help, with an extremely low ambient temperature.

 

Oh, and it is possible that some dust and other debris is clogging up the cooling system and minimizing its effectiveness. Not too long ago my dad's computer had a really loud fan, all the time, and the vid card temps were rather high. I pulled out the video card, disassembled the fan unit, and sure enough there was a ton of dust caked on. After some fun with the air compressor, I put everything back together and viola - temps were much lower, and the fan was whisper quiet.

 

good to know. Thanks. I was wrong earlier, as it looks like my idle temperatures are running closer to 38C . When it has shut down the game, according to my "Core Temp" App, MAX Temperature has never been more then 91C

[ninjonxb]

Thank you! I just knew as soon as I posted someone would bash Apple, but it does seem that the comment against MacBook Airs may be more correct then I wanted to believe. now that I think of it, most of what I read was pertaining to MacBook Pros. I thought that since my air doesn't have the retina display, it might take less to drive it, but I am somewhat ignorant when it comes to this stuff.

 

Do you mind me asking, What are the Specs on your pro, and How do you deal with any heating issues?

Thanks

 

2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB of ram, Intel Iris Pro 1536MB.

As far as heat goes, my fans go pretty crazy when I am Windows anyways. But I try to avoid long gaming sessions on my macbook pro, but when I do I have it on a table and sometimes I use one of those cooling pads (wether they actually help for a macbook is up for debate).

The one thing to remember about MacBooks though is that the entire case essentially acts like a heat sync. The case/your lap getting hot is to be expected and in itself is not necessarily bad (there is a point that this is no longer the case though).

 

The macbook pro also does a really good job of getting rid of heat.

While the macbook air does not have a retina screen, it also does not have as much power.

 

Unfortunately within the gaming community people like to quickly bash Mac's. Some is warranted due to the limited support of gaming on the Mac OS. But there are plenty of reasons that you have to have a Mac and it makes a perfectly suitable (depending on the Mac) gaming machine if you install Windows.

Edited February 3, 2016 by ninjonxb

[NoFishing]

2012 macbook air....windows 10...intel 5k graphics.....lol