There could always be the option of placing the parts that make the noise outside the silent room. (just a suggestion for the next round, and fwiw, Chrome will make any PC run hotter, it's not very good efficiency-wise.)
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iMac M1 - Little fan noise
- Thread starter dani31
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Just to clarify, it's the left fan that makes a little more noise than the one on the right.
Last edited:
iMac M1 24" Teardown
Is the new M1 iMac just a silly-sized M1 iPad, a detached-keyboard M1 MacBook, an M1 Mac Mini stretched out like pizza dough? We’ll only know by...
www.ifixit.com
Well technically, fans are NOT connected to the chip and therefore, the cooling performance is bad. It just blow airs and that's all. So yeah, it only has a heat sink which isn't connected to fans. M1 Mac mini has a proper cooling system so I dont understand why they would do that. Maxtech's videos shows that M1 iMac's temperature is way higher than M1 Mac mini.
Yup, another stupid design from Apple.
Because it’s more than adequate cooling for that chip. What would a more involve cooling solve? The M1 iMac performance under load is just as good as any other actively cooled M1 machine which means that the cooling system does exactly what it’s supposed to do.
You said it's adequate and yet, the temperature difference is huge. Do you even aware that both iMacs throttle? How many times do people have to defend Apple's stupid design? It's BETTER to have a proper cooling system like M1 Mac mini and M1 iMac is a desktop. Why sacrifice the potential power by NOT connecting fans to the chip? Stop playing with their idiotic ideas. It's just stupid.
Who cares about the temperature?
I haven’t seen any evidence that the iMac is slower than the Mac Mini. Could you give me a source on this?
Its easy to talk about thermal engineering when one is not an engineer. I assure yiu that the Mac engineering team know much more about these things than you ever will.
I care and some cares. Consistently having high temperature isnt good for hardware.
Do you really think Apple engineers are always right? Not at all. Look how pathetically made Mac Pro 2013. It's not the first time.
That is good to know. But, on you tube people have posted the fans running and measured the noise. It seems to be very quiet since they run so cool. But, it does make some noise.
Understood. My old MacBook Pro from a few years ago was very fan noisy Compared to my 2019 model. I do a lot of bitmap transmogrification on my new MacBook Pro.
Ah yes, the wisdom of the forums. In the meantime there is zero academic research or empirical evidence that shows that running consumer PC hardware at higher temps has any practical relevance for it's longevity, and the chip manufacturers happily give you full warranty even if you run their chips at 100C 24/7.
It's funny how many things we "know" without actually having any data to back them up. In some countries they believe that washing your hair and then going out is likely to kill you.
I watched that video a while ago. He shows that the baseline iMac throttles. The one with lower binned (=less power efficient) SoC and a single fan. The more expensive two-fan model — the model we are talking about here — has the same peak and sustained performance as the Mini and the MacBook Pro, which shows that it's cooling is perfectly adequate.
The cylinder Mac Pro was an engineering marvel. No, it wasn't a good product in the long run and it wasn't a product with any future, which is why it got scraped. But from the engineering perspective, especially in regards to it's cooling system, it was seriously impressive. It had an innovative, extremely efficient cooling system, and it was able to pack some serious hardware into a very compact and silent package. Apple's engineering was not at fault with that Mac Pro model. The problem was strategy, as that design was created under the assumption that the chip manufacturing process will continue to advance at the previous rate (hint: it did not).
You don't seem to understand the context. Try again. A "silent fan" said in this context simply means that it's inaudible over background noise.
Hi,
Sometimes I hear a small popping noise just after entering the user password, you can hear it if the room is quiet, so far I have never heard this noise after startup, it's a bit like the sound a mechanical hard drive makes before it shuts down.
I locate this noise around the middle of the chin.
Sometimes I hear a small popping noise just after entering the user password, you can hear it if the room is quiet, so far I have never heard this noise after startup, it's a bit like the sound a mechanical hard drive makes before it shuts down.
I locate this noise around the middle of the chin.
Last edited:
Which means it’s situational and individual. Where I’m sitting now, I have an AC vigorously trying to improve the working air and temperature environment at the cost of noise. A quiet computer fan is a complete non-issue here, and probably wouldn’t be heard at all.
At home however, I don’t have any kind of forced air ventilation. It’s really quiet. In my home, I really prefer quiet computers. Both my PC and my Mac, while both built and selected respectively for their quiet cooling, are both still noisier than I’d like, by a wide margin.
So whether you find the single fan Mac quiet enough depends on who you are, where you are, and what you use it for. There will never be a consensus regarding something so individual and situational. Fact remains though that the dual fan set-up is demonstrably and audibly quieter when the iMac is under load. Since the dual fan setup exists, it’s also clear that Apple is aware of this, and I feel that its a cheap move to remove one of the fans in the low end model and not even say it anywhere.
(I’m also not terribly impressed by the ”thin trumps everything regardless of compromises” design ethos of the 24” iMac. A mains powered general computer removes a number of design constraints which can’t be taken advantage of if you force it into this shape.)
I can't hear the fan noise on my M1 mini. It sits behind a monitor but I can't hear it even when I go around the monitor to the mini. The fans typically spin around 1,700 RPMs. I also have a Windows desktop and I can't hear it either. The fans typically spin around 1,000 RPM and there are a lot of them. I'm in a basement, though, and it's generally cool down here.
I also have a Late 2009 iMac 27 and it runs quiet but the metal back can get pretty warm. I guess that iMac used the back of the computer as a heat sink. I don't know what you can do on the iMac 24 to get the fan noise down - it's a thin design.
I do understand the desire for quiet, though. I'm hoping that the larger iMac has good ventilation or cooling. The mini really does a great job at being silent. The MacBook Air is the best of course.
I also have a Late 2009 iMac 27 and it runs quiet but the metal back can get pretty warm. I guess that iMac used the back of the computer as a heat sink. I don't know what you can do on the iMac 24 to get the fan noise down - it's a thin design.
I do understand the desire for quiet, though. I'm hoping that the larger iMac has good ventilation or cooling. The mini really does a great job at being silent. The MacBook Air is the best of course.
base model 24" iMac here with easily audible fan noise. three other base model 24" iMacs also here, zero fan noises. as in, silent, as expected. Macs Fan Control lets me see temps of various sensors EXCEPT display and rear enclosure sensors. temps are all in normal range. ran Heaven on the unit with loud fan, with and without Macs Fan Control, no difference in performance.
has anyone actually done any research on this? or are we all just throwing opinions around?
has anyone actually done any research on this? or are we all just throwing opinions around?
But that's a complete contradiction. How was it an engineering marvel is the cooling system wasn't adequate and it had no foreseeable future?
There was nothing innovative about the cooling system and it wasn't silent (in fact, the fan was maxing out under modest loads). It was just an aluminium heat sink connected directly to a Xeon CPU and two mid-range GPUs. It was a recipe for disaster since the heatsink must share its capacity with all three dies, rather than each being controlled independently, as with the 5,1 and 7,1 Mac Pros.
What on earth are you talking about? That's a contradiction. It didn't matter what their assumption was for future manufacturing processes; the fact is the strategy wasn't correct for the first generation of the device, hence why they overheated and failed.
The strategy informed the engineering, and that is the reason why the engineering was restricted to an enclosure with a small volume relative to the heat output.
One nice thing about the old 27 inch iMacs is that they were so big that the iMac blocked off some of the fan noise. I have a 2015 and a 2010 on my desk and there's no audible noise. The fans on both are spinning though. I don't run anything heavy on them - I mainly use the screens to display stuff to read or write. I run stuff that requires a lot of CPU on my M1 mini.
I do hope that they do a 27 inch Apple Silicon iMac someday. They can just use the cooling system on the old 27 inch iMacs. It will be complete overkill.
Have you considered the possibility that you're the one being stupid here, not the multiple engineers and managers who created and signed off on those designs?
Fans don't have to be "connected" to anything if the airflow they create is guided by ductwork so that it passes through the heatsinks it needs to cool. Guess what exists in both of those computers, when fully assembled? Apple's designers take full advantage of controlling the shape of everything in the machine, so you have to look at all the components seen in a teardown and think about how they fit together when assembled, rather than just knee-jerk reacting to a single picture of a mostly disassembled machine.
But hey you saw those pics posted somewhere on a forum of PC overclocker d00dz who know it all and they made fun of them so their dimwitted criticisms MUST be true, right?
Engineering is designing solutions to problems. There is no contradiction in stating that the solutions to problems can be very clever and even rise to the level of a "marvel" even when those problems only exist because the constraints put on engineers were unnecessary or misguided.
The constraints Apple's hardware engineers were given were roughly "~500W thermal budget, pack in as much compute as you possibly can, keep it as silent and compact as possible". They knocked it out of the park. Success on all fronts.
The product turned out to be an ill-conceived failure because it was a big gamble on pro apps not just shifting most of their compute needs to GPU, but also taking full advantage of multiple GPUs. That didn't work out, Apple wasn't able to push enough companies to recode their apps around the 2013 Mac Pro's architecture.
(Multi-GPU was especially important. CPUs and GPUs both get far less power efficient at the top end of their frequency range, so what Apple did to maximize performance per watt was to underclock two GPUs rather than put in a single high performance GPU. But in practice, very few apps were rewritten to take full advantage of this.)
No, it's not awful to share the same heatsink for all three chips.
No, the fan didn't max out under modest loads. This is literally the first time I've ever heard anyone claim that about the 2013 Mac Pro, reviews from the time said the opposite.
You seem to live in an alternate reality. In mine, the 2013 Mac Pro was not known for overheating. There are known strategic problems with the design that prevented it from scaling up to what their customers actually wanted, acknowledged by Apple in that unusual press event they ran a few years back, but overheating? No, not at all.