[ayeung]

This is just my experience, but I had observed a wild temperature difference at idle and load on two identical MacBook Pros.

I’d already recently (within days) replaced the thermal paste with the same paste but still one of them was getting 10-15 deg C hotter.

The one that was cooler had been through AppleCare and it appears the copper surface had been scratched up intentionally as well as some dents on the fins.

The worse performing heat sink looked immaculate aside from some dust over the years. The copper surface was polished smooth.

Just for the heck of it I swapped the heat sinks and now the temps were reversed.

In the end I figured maybe the heat pipes were damaged or there was some performance differences of the heat pipes during manufacturing.