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Mid 2012 model, A1278 / 2.5 GHz i5 or 2.9 GHz i7 processor.

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What keeps killing my fan?

Hey, so recently my fan had given up the ghost, so I bought a new one and installed it.

Everything worked fine, until a couple of weeks ago I noticed that again iStat showed 0 rpm. So I opened my Macbook, took the fan out and since I didn't know what to do, I put it back in. And, voila, it worked again.

I had to witness this game a couple times since then, sometimes I just needed to reboot and the fan would start going again, but now it seems it has died, again, eventually. So I'm gonna get a new one of course, but my concern is that the new one also won't last quite long. So I gotta ask: What keeps killing my fan?

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And as I was writing this text, it jumped back to 2000 rpm. What the heck is going on?

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Which are you are using? iStat Menus 5 or iStat

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Frankly, I've had issues in the past with quite a few of these monitoring apps. I've found some don't report via SMC but by SMART only with the drives. Some have there polling get hung.

I've found TG Pro has been the most stable and easiest to use. I would recommend you remove the others and give TG Pro a try. While you could still have a fan issue TG Pro offers an effective logging function so you might see a correlation on what is happening when the fan winks out (payed version).

As to what to do to fix the fan issue. I've encountered odd issues with SMC that you need to reset it. Follow this Apple TN to see if that helps: Reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac

Often I've found older SMC temp override software was the issue so do take out any override apps like SMC fan Control (you shouldn't need them)

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thanks for the answer. weird thing is: TG Pro says that my fan appears to be working properly. even though the monitoring says its at constant 0 rpm. also manual fan boosting does not have any effect.

also the SMC reset does not seem to have any impact on anything...I'm not even sure a reset has been taken place...any ideas?

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At this point something I'm thinking something is messed up in your boot drive. How about creating an external bootable drive to see if that makes a difference. Don't forget to re-install TG Pro on the external drive. See if that makes a difference.

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i'll give it a try. besides, TG Pro says: This model of Mac will safely turn the fan off when the CPU is running at low capacity.

thus TG Pro doesn't have any control over the fans...

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ok, I stumbled upon an alternative way of doing the SMC reset which is to disconnect the battery, hold down the power button for 10 secs and reconnect the battery and, voila, it worked! fan's running now around 2000 rpm. but I dont know how continuous this success is, so I'll keep you updated about the issue...

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TG Pro is a bit different in how it handles the fan unlike the other apps. It only kicks in when the temp is running hot and only at the set point you set to add a few RPM's to ramp up the cooling before you run something heavy.

TG Pro will alert you when the systems temp is running hot. The logging function will allow you to see the history of the temps & fan's over a week or so.

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