The situation:
I work in a very quiet office using MBP Spring 2011 with an i7. The problem is that when I put an intense but short workload for a few seconds on the CPU the fans spin up heavily, disturbing me and especially my office mates.
I elevated the MAC to get some air flowing under the body but that was not sufficient.
So I found a solution to limit the fan speed, currently limiting it to 3500 by using:
cd /Applications/smcFanControl.app/Contents/Resources
./smc -k F0Mx -w 36b0
./smc -k F1Mx -w 36b0
The question:
How dangerous is doing this?
My current line of thinking is: the cooling is now insufficient for intense long workloads. But if the CPU gets too hot it will just throttle or at worst the MBP might shut down, but nothing worse should happen. Many Laptops have dusty or broken fans and they don't burn out their CPUs either.
Is this a reasonable assumption or am I risking real damage here?