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How loud is your new iMac "24???

The iMac can have an audible "whisper hum"

Yet it is far more pleasant than any laptops/Macbook's whining high pitched fans.

Coming from an iMac to a Macbook Pro and Tower I truly miss the iMac's ambience :D
 
I have the original iMac 24" with the nvidia 7600GT video card on it. Normally it's very quiet. But since I also play World of Warcraft on it I have to use the little utility smcFanControl to pump up the fan speeds in the computer or else it will start to overheat and you get major graphical glitches in-game. When you increase the fan speeds you do hear them quite a bit...but it keeps stuff cool for the most part.

I get along with the iMac, but it's not really made for games. For one thing the input lag is terrible and you see major screen stutters with the LCD catching up to what you're doing (it's an excellent display, just not designed for fast response times like games but it's excellent for graphics work like Photoshop and the like)...and while the design of the iMac is quite nice, it's not very efficient when it comes to airflow or keeping things cool.

Maybe it's the old-school engineer in me, but I prefer function over form.
And yes, I'd love to instead use one of the Mac Pros...but I just can't afford something like that at the moment. Maybe when the new ones come out and I see what options they have.
 
workerbee said:
A MacBook Air with SSD HardDisk might be what you need. No moving parts = no noise (unless you push it, of course).

BTW, I'm the same boat - I like my computers to be silent, and sold a G4 tower a few days after buying it because it was simply unbearably noisy.

I'm strongly considering an iMac presently, as a Mac Pro is a) overpriced and b) not silent enough and my MacBook Pro is quite noisy when it's either warm in the room or I feel like a little Spore. :D
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Haha... Spore is not really a game of the Crysis level, but it seems to be able to drive your MacBook Pro crazy... :)
Today I've been looking at the iMac's and MacBooks in the store. I couldn't hear any noise coming from the iMac's (2,8Ghz and 3,06Ghz models). They are really quiet while doing some office work and are not so hot as speculated. O yeah, and the screen is amazing: so huge with vibrant colours.

Should I order one of those pretty iMac's right now? hmmmm :)
 
My imac has a noticable hum coming from bottom left. Its not extremely loud, but is louder than for example my BT vision box when it is on standby. (for anyone who has BT vision.)

Do you think I should send in my iMac to get it looked at? The iMacs at my school all seem pretty silent aswell.
 
Mine sits on a desk facing a big picture window. The only time it makes any noise is when the sun hits the back of it; it warms-up quickly and soon becomes hot to the touch. Then one or maybe even two fans inside kick-on and it makes a "subdued" whirring noise, as opposed to the "frantic" whirring noise my iBook makes when it gets hot. I honestly cannot imagine anyone having issues with the sounds made by a 24" iMac, it is silent most of the time. :apple:
 
Mine is pretty darn silent.

I use my iMac for email, web, word processing, encoding MP4s using handbrake and playing games and I've never really heard much in the way of fans or humming at all.
 
Hey fellas,

Thanks for all your replies. I've already ordered my first mac machine: the high-end iMac (24", 750GB, nVidia 8800GS). This one have been ordered in combination with the new iTouch (32GB) as a back-to-school promotion offer.
I hope to receive it in the coming 3-5 days. So looking forward to touch my new iMac (Today I've visited the Apple Store and really liked those great machines).
I will let you know what I will think about the noise issues. Hope my iMac will be silent.
See you! :)
 
xpipe said:
They tell me my iMac has fans, but I still don't believe it. Occasionally you'll hear a little sound when the hard drive does something, but mine is otherwise dead quiet.
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+1 Can't heard the machine even if I try. iStat says I have fans, and they are running at 1200 rpm, but I can't hear them.

(FWIW- 24" 3.08 gHz iMac with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS)
 
gcrowell said:
+1 Can't heard the machine even if I try. iStat says I have fans, and they are running at 1200 rpm, but I can't hear them.

(FWIW- 24" 3.08 gHz iMac with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS)
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So how come I can hear my fans humming when there running at 1200?

Do you mean if you are sitting at the desk trying to listen, you cant hear the iMac atall?

My 1 year of apple care ends soon, and I need to know wether to send my mac in now or not!
 
Pretty much silent

I have two 24" iMacs (white version, not the latest model) and I can say that they are virtually silent. Every now and then if the room is completely silent I might be able to hear the fan ever so slightly. Then again, that computer is about 2 years old and has been on all the time. Also, I'm almost always running Parallels along with Mac and it's still silent. Before my current comp I had a 20" iMac and it was also basically silent. It has moving parts so it's not going to be completely silent, but it's probably as good as it gets for something that does have moving parts. I was a PC user for many years (still use 'em at work) and they are all annoying loud in comparison.

One other quick note, I bought a WD 500GB OneTouch external hard drive and put it on the top shelf of my desk above my iMac and it was louder than my iMac...I like silence so I ended up buying a USB extension cable and putting it in the closet; now my desk is peaceful again.

Hope this helps.
 
I have a new (3 week old) 24" aluminum iMac with the 3.06 GHz processor, nVidia 8800GS, and 500 GB drive.

It is in a quiet room, and as far as I can tell it is absolutely silent. No sound from the fans or disk drive at all, even when used for games that exercise the vidoe card and processor.

Hope it stays this way. Overall, I am very happy with it.
 
The new iMacs may not be completely, absolutely, measurably dead silent, but they sure are the quietest machines I have ever witnessed - I for one cannot make any noise out when I concentrate on the iMac. Something I could not say of any other desktop I've worked with so far.
 
Are the newest ones really any noisier than the previous generation? I have to say I can't hear a thing from my iMac--and I am pretty noise sensitive. I live alone and hate any noise other than what I create. I can hear Time Capsule start up and run backups but that is about it unless I have iTunes on.
 
sk8mash said:
My imac has a noticable hum coming from bottom left. Its not extremely loud, but is louder than for example my BT vision box when it is on standby. (for anyone who has BT vision.)

Do you think I should send in my iMac to get it looked at? The iMacs at my school all seem pretty silent aswell.
Click to expand...

You could try, however I doubt that it will change. If you look up the technical specs for the iMac from the Apple website the iMacs are rated with some low 20db figure at light load. This is a low number for a typical office or school environment. However at home in in a quiet setting this will be quite noticeable.

If you look at some of the photos from people disassembling their iMac you will see that at the lower left there is a big fan that sucks in the air for cooling of the unit.
I had Apple changing the fan in my iMac since a lot of people told me that their iMac is really, really, absolutely dead silent. It did not make a difference. The fan can be heard quite the same. I now have come to accept it and maybe there are dead quiet machines out there or people live in areas with higher background noise than I or maybe prolonged listening to maxed out iPods has somehow impaired their hearing - I don't know.

If somebody with an absolutely, dead quiet machine lives somewhere near Berlin, Germany, I would like to ask if I could check out their machine. So far even all the Apple people told me that I can not expect it to be COMPLETELY silent.
 
Detektiv-Pinky said:
You could try, however I doubt that it will change. If you look up the technical specs for the iMac from the Apple website the iMacs are rated with some low 20db figure at light load. This is a low number for a typical office or school environment. However at home in in a quiet setting this will be quite noticeable.

If you look at some of the photos from people disassembling their iMac you will see that at the lower left there is a big fan that sucks in the air for cooling of the unit.
I had Apple changing the fan in my iMac since a lot of people told me that their iMac is really, really, absolutely dead silent. It did not make a difference. The fan can be heard quite the same. I now have come to accept it and maybe there are dead quiet machines out there or people live in areas with higher background noise than I or maybe prolonged listening to maxed out iPods has somehow impaired their hearing - I don't know.

If somebody with an absolutely, dead quiet machine lives somewhere near Berlin, Germany, I would like to ask if I could check out their machine. So far even all the Apple people told me that I can not expect it to be COMPLETELY silent.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Thats the sort of answer I'm after. I feel very skeptical of anyone who claims to have a dead silent iMac. Im going to go check out my school iMacs tomorrow, they have 12 new ones and 6 old ones. I guess that should tell me the definite answer.
 
sk8mash said:
Thanks, Thats the sort of answer I'm after. I feel very skeptical of anyone who claims to have a dead silent iMac. Im going to go check out my school iMacs tomorrow, they have 12 new ones and 6 old ones. I guess that should tell me the definite answer.
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Make sure you do the testing in a really quiet environment (I have some doubts that a school-environment is a good reference point). As I said, the noise rating for the iMac is quite low and the fan noise can be easily drowned out by ambient noise (such as coming from air conditioning). In which chase you would perceive the machine as 'absolutely' silent (relative to this setting).

This happened to me when I picked up my iMac after repair. I 'thought' that I could no longer hear it when I made the pickup and I had the guy to 'turn it on - just to make sure'. However, at home I found that nothing had really changed.
 
my iMac is so quiet that I can hear my WD hard drive humming. I live in a real quiet residential area I can hear Air conditioning humming from a block away from one of my neighbor. so yes, it is real quiet.
 
Pretty quiet for me too, I've played spore on it for hours and didn't hear a thing. When it awakes from sleep you can hear the drive but other then that I can't hear a thing.
 
stillill said:
I have the 24" 3.06thing, with a 8800 card and a 750gig hdd.

It is not silent, there is always a fairly audible fan going. It may be the HDD. It is a PITA. It can be heard across the room. It is very disappointing.

When I got it at first, it was absolutely dead silent. Nothing was audible. Then it went noisey after a month. Fan running all the time at 1200rpm. Took it back, it was replaced, but the replacement was instantly noisy. I didn't take the 2nd one back as it's a chore to lug it back to the store.

Maybe the 500gig would have been silent. Don't feel I've wasted my money, but having use previous iMac without a sound, I feel the recent 24" alu's are a step backwards.

Best of luck
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Isn't 1200 RPM the minimum for iMac's CPU fan?
 
My 24" iMac is basically silent when in use all of the time. I use it in a very quiet study room and have to put my ear to the display to here the fan/hard drive noise.

I'm surprised at how many people have noisy iMacs. I would get them seen to.
 
There is one point to consider though: whether the back of your machine is oriented towards a wall or not. A close wall will return the sound to you, doubling (or more?) the total noise. If the back of the computer is turned to a bigger space (say you are sitting parallel to a wall), then it's much more silent.
Sounds trivial or ridiculous, but it does make a difference. (And the laptops can be easier placed in the middle of a room).

I've suffered from noise issues in the first G5 iMac and checked many solutions, including a damping foot (the vibrations were increasing in the hollow table...) and sound-damping material against the wall. But that was for the oldest G5 iMac (rev. A!). :rolleyes:

If you work at 6am or 11pm, and there is no noise around, you will hear a faint whisper. It also depends on your work - encoding video will make the iMac noisier than typing in Word or PowerPoint.

NB: Are there really dead-silent computers anywhere nowadays, besides the netbooks? Even the laptops have fans.
 
Arnaud said:
<snip>

NB: Are there really dead-silent computers anywhere nowadays, besides the netbooks? Even the laptops have fans.
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Good question!

Certainly the ones you buy straight from the shop are not necessary very quiet and according to some very pedandic (noisewise) people the iMac is one of the best, but still audible: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article693-page1.html

To get even better results people usually build their own systems (a difficult road when you still intent to run OSX). However, it quickly becomes obsessive and if you read the following article (http://www.silentpcreview.com/article669-page1.html) you can become convinced that it might no be feasible.
Even fan-less computers can emit noise from transformers and electronics (as some early MacBook Pro owners have found out).

So maybe it is time to invest in a separate server room ;)
 
Silence is OK, but on the other side is the heat. So you should balance silence and heat.
 
I've been worried about my 2.8, 24" iMac for a few weeks now.
It's relatively loud and I think it's the hard drive making all of the noise.
It started off dead silent, but now I can hear it 'reading the hard drive' anytime it's on.
I had the same issue with my old MacBook which was replaced (also had screen flickering problem).

The screen on my iMac has that uh...black uneven-ness that people have mentioned time and time again on this forum. It's very noticeable. I'll post pictures if I can later.

Would you guys care if your iMac had the aforementioned issues? I don't know if I should report it to Apple Care since I really doubt they'll be able to 'fix' anything.
 
Clyde099 said:
I've been worried about my 2.8, 24" iMac for a few weeks now.
It's relatively loud and I think it's the hard drive making all of the noise.
It started off dead silent, but now I can hear it 'reading the hard drive' anytime it's on.
I had the same issue with my old MacBook which was replaced (also had screen flickering problem).

The screen on my iMac has that uh...black uneven-ness that people have mentioned time and time again on this forum. It's very noticeable. I'll post pictures if I can later.

Would you guys care if your iMac had the aforementioned issues? I don't know if I should report it to Apple Care since I really doubt they'll be able to 'fix' anything.
Click to expand...

Is the noice 'constant' or does it change depending on what you do on the iMac?
Have you looked at the 'SMART'-status of of your hard drive? There might be something physically wrong with it...

(Make sure you back it up often!)
 
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