Hi,
I picked up an i5 27" from an Apple Store in Toronto today, and was hoping that this would finally be the first time in my life I'd get a problem-free Mac on the first try, but much to my dismay the first thing I noticed when I turned it on was a LOUD noise coming from the lower left side of the computer. It is EXTREMELY annoying, and you can hear it from several meters away. I am currently playing music to try to overpower it, but it is actually ruining the music as well.
My first thought was that one of the fans is the root of the problem, and a quick test with smcfancontrol confirmed this. The sound is not a wooshing sound, but more like an extremely rapid ticking or maybe even the sound of the fan hitting another component during each rotation. I could locate the exact source of the sound with smcfancontrol, as increasing the minimum speed of the cpufan increases the frequency of the sound. I called Apple, and they said it is most likely a hardware error, and that I'll get a new iMac if I go back to the store where I got it, but it's a 3 hours drive away, and I don't have time to go until two weeks from now. Therefore I want to check out all other options first. Everything else works fine, but the sound just makes me want to punch the monitor as hard as I can, so if there is a way to fix it I would be happy to keep the computer. Anyone got any tips?
PS. The sound disappears in standby mode fwiw.
I picked up an i5 27" from an Apple Store in Toronto today, and was hoping that this would finally be the first time in my life I'd get a problem-free Mac on the first try, but much to my dismay the first thing I noticed when I turned it on was a LOUD noise coming from the lower left side of the computer. It is EXTREMELY annoying, and you can hear it from several meters away. I am currently playing music to try to overpower it, but it is actually ruining the music as well.
My first thought was that one of the fans is the root of the problem, and a quick test with smcfancontrol confirmed this. The sound is not a wooshing sound, but more like an extremely rapid ticking or maybe even the sound of the fan hitting another component during each rotation. I could locate the exact source of the sound with smcfancontrol, as increasing the minimum speed of the cpufan increases the frequency of the sound. I called Apple, and they said it is most likely a hardware error, and that I'll get a new iMac if I go back to the store where I got it, but it's a 3 hours drive away, and I don't have time to go until two weeks from now. Therefore I want to check out all other options first. Everything else works fine, but the sound just makes me want to punch the monitor as hard as I can, so if there is a way to fix it I would be happy to keep the computer. Anyone got any tips?
PS. The sound disappears in standby mode fwiw.