Mac Mini M4 fan stuck at 1000 RPM

If this Mac mini is within the environmental requirements and with adequate airflow available, it’ll work.

The apparent or feels-like temperature takes other factors into account, and with no single accepted definition.

Mac mini specifies the measured temperature and humidity, and not the apparent nor wet-bulb globe nor other sorts of subjective temperature measurements.

Apple doesn’t publish its processor thermals, butnyour reported range matches others’ reports elsewhere.

If a Mac trends toward its thermal limits, it’ll increase active cooling where available, and will decrease clock speed where available; it’ll increase the fan speed and will thermally throttle. If the Mac goes badly out of range, it’ll shut down (hard) to protect itself.

As lanstrad1 suggests you should use the free MacsFanControl.

https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

I've had it installed on all my Macs for years and whenever I notice the temperature rising too much I manually increase the fan speed.

It shows the temperatures of all the components on the right so you know what's going on.

I can't tell for the M4, but always be tempted to tell the sillicon-based are less prone to heating than the Intel-based. I have indeed an Intel-based (2018) mac mini and it often tend to heat a lot.

I use a third party (Macs Fan Control) app which regulates RPM of the fan either automatically or manually. It tells me by core what is the temperature, and many times, I see cores at 80 Celcius or more.

RPM is basically running between 1700 and 3000 or higher as needed.

I'm not claiming this is a reference. But 1000 does not impress me. At contrary, if really your temperature is around 100 Celcius, at least in the case of my 2018, it would run much higher RPM.

Obviously, if I had a brand new M4, I'd have it checked while under warranty.

I am afraid this new fan behaviour is intended. Apple changed the fan control curves. The M1 Mini was ramped up much quicker, but mostly didn't need to, because it almost never got hot. The denser packed Mini M4 gets hot more quickly, but, my interpretation, Apple doesn't want fan noise to point this out and to annoy the user, because on the Intel Minis, this fan noise felt cheap and screamed insufficient cooling solution.

Everyone will tell you that 100°C is fine and dandy, which may be true for some components, but definitely not for others close by, like capacitors. It is much too early to see if the prolonged heat will have detrimental effects in the long run. Warm expands, cold contracts, so of course this exhibits a force on components that behave differently and at the same time are bonded together. Xbox Red Ring of Death, anyone?

My Mac Mini M4 pro is always about 1000 RPM. Once it went to 1150 while under high load.

FWIW I have had 6 new desktop Macs in the past 20 years and never has the fan speed increased.

I would see the machine getting hotter and hotter but the fans never kicked in.

That is why I started using MacsFanControl, so that whenever I felt things were getting hot I could speed up the fans.

Yes, that way the fan will slowly ramp up a little as needed and will most likely never end up going full speed for any length of time.

You may want to also test 40C start and 120C max to see if it smooths out even more.

FWIW I just rendered a 30m blu-ray movie and burned to a Blu-ray disc. My Mini M4 pro fan speed increased to about 2800 rpm after the first 10 minutes of burning and quickly fell back to 1000 rpm once completed. I saw some temps >200F

The mini isn’t for gaming. Return while you’re still within the window. Do not replace!

Select the "Power Manager" sensor and set the Start to increase at around 50C and the Max at around 100C.

Has the M4 got a reduced number of temperature sensors?

My M2 has 13 whereas the screenshot of the M4 shows 4.

My Mini Pro has the following sensor readings:

8 performance cores

4 CPU clusters

1 internal

4 efficiency cores

The OP's base model appears to be 4.