Just wish to share a happy UPDATE:
As I had been reporting lately, my laptop had become unreliable in gigs because an hour in, it starts to glitch the dj software. I had been using djay predominantly and not much serato. But serato 4 came out this week and I jumped in after installing> I tried a bedroom practice on it and boy was I shocked! Started the practice with excitement but 40 minutes in, this happened (sound distortion progressively got worse till I couldn’t hear anything and had to shut down)
This got me thinking - and i sent this video to serato support - who confirmed my worse fears: thermal throttling. Despite the fact I was seated in a cool room, they still insisted that my laptop is powerful enough to run their software but it was thermal throttling. They gave me a script to run in Terminal to track CPU core temperature in real time
sudo powermetrics --samplers smc |grep -i “CPU die temperature”
Running it while I performed showed my CPU was getting superhot, drawing back power as expected, kicking fan as expected, but wouldn’t cool down to expected temperatures despite max fan speeds.
Another techie then told me to take it to a local techie who is confident with disassembling my mac and doing:
- General internal dust/debris cleanup with a blower (after removing back cover, but before touching any internal screws EXCEPT battery which must stay disconnected)
Boy this laptop had sand everywhere (not just dust).
2. Fan fins, cooling fins and cooling vents cleanup
Other than the fan blade being covered in dust, we found the vent grile covered with excessive lint, like a rat-house full of dirty cotton wool.
3. Remove old thermal paste and re-apply new paste on both CPU and GPU.
I used the cheapest thermal paste (as it was the only one I could find locally) - HM501 - and wow, the old paste was not just dried up but there were some areas completely devoid of paste! My techie didn’t do a good job at spreading his too, but fortunately he was generous with it.
AND the RESULT?
Wow! I was amazed. We did an outdoor trial run with both bluetooth and wifi enabled for the ourpose fo pushing the machine:
A). With 1 hour on serato 4.0 + MixEmergency projecting video out to a display - No sound or app issues whatsoever.
B). With 1 hour of djay 5.5 also projecting video out No sound issues except the usual shaking waveform on projecting video as reported earlier (but doesn’t get worse nor glitch anything).
I really hope this gets fixed in djay 5.5.2 update!
From the look and feel of it, I now have more confidence in my laptop+djay for future gigs. A number of the lagginess I used to feel in djay have largely disappeared (well, except for the stems delay since djay doesn’t analyse stems on song load despite having 1-track stems waveform active) - a request for which I placed here: Enable Neural Mix Pre-Analysis when “1-Track NM Waveform” Option is Selected
@DJ_Big_Blender I think I am now a bit relieved. My laptop had seen alot of dust over the past 5years and I had no idea it was bogging it down.
