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Mac studio v1 fan noise - it's going to be one of the loudest Macs at idle.
- Thread starter AdamSeen
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I have an M1 Max and it’s silent. It’s around half a meter away from where I’m sitting on the desk. Idle speed 1300rpm but I also use Mac fan speed to ramp up more to keep things cool when I’m rendering stuff out. I’ll do a dab measurement later for you guys. Great machine!
I just received my Max Studio with 32 GPU, 64GB RAM, and 1TB SSD. I can hear a gentle sound of the wind blowing out the back, but that's it. To hear that, I need to put my ear near the Studio. I have equipment to do testing and will do an RTA once I have everything nicely in place, but even with the Studio sitting right in front of me, the noise is not sufficient to be concerned. What does concern me however is how big the Studio is in real life! I guess for the power it's small, but man this is one chunky box.
Tried Mac Studio and the first thing that caught my attention was the fan noise. It’s annoying and while the Mac Studio is doing light work to loud. Comes summer when the room is hotter the fan will only run more. Not for
Me.
Me.
You don’t have to do that. The Mac Studio has a huge thermal capacity. Keep in mind that the same chip is running in 14“ and 16“ MacBook Pros with fans not running at idle at all.
I’m pretty confident that the MacStudio does not need to run its fans faster in summer unless you put it in direkt sunlight for a long period time or on a black surface or something like that. ?
The MacStudio can get around 65°C warm (Double than during idle) and it does not spin up its fans.
That’s the advantage of having strong fans running all the time (at the cost of noise).
Some good news from MacsFanControl: https://crystalidea.com/blog/mac-studio-fan-control-and-fan-noise
A zero-RPM fan mode would be truly fantastic - (Assuming their tests show that it's safe).
A zero-RPM fan mode would be truly fantastic - (Assuming their tests show that it's safe).
People still confuse the fan noise with the coil whine. The fan noise is super subjective, for some it's inaudible, others hear it to the point where it annoys them. But that's what it is. Take it or leave it.
The coil whine on the other hand, is objectively loud and audible and not all units sold show it. Can we please distinguish between the two when we continue this thread? I am getting tired of people that have no coil whine and aren't annoyed by the fan noise but at the same time keep participating in this thread and telling others it's all good and dandy. Let's focus on the actual problem, please, and that's the coil whine.
The thread should be renamed accordingly. I think we can all agree that fan noise is not the issue.
The coil whine on the other hand, is objectively loud and audible and not all units sold show it. Can we please distinguish between the two when we continue this thread? I am getting tired of people that have no coil whine and aren't annoyed by the fan noise but at the same time keep participating in this thread and telling others it's all good and dandy. Let's focus on the actual problem, please, and that's the coil whine.
The thread should be renamed accordingly. I think we can all agree that fan noise is not the issue.
I don't think that all people confuse fan noise with coil whine.
I know how coil whine sounds and am very confident that I can distinguish it from a mechanical noise from the fans.
My Mac Studio had definitely a mechanical problem. Be it bad engineering, a defect or just super cheap components.
If Mac Studios have coil whine, the coils are maybe the cheapest Apple could find. Coil whine happens only because coils are cheap and/or the engineer/manufacturer have no clue how to build them.
I know how coil whine sounds and am very confident that I can distinguish it from a mechanical noise from the fans.
My Mac Studio had definitely a mechanical problem. Be it bad engineering, a defect or just super cheap components.
If Mac Studios have coil whine, the coils are maybe the cheapest Apple could find. Coil whine happens only because coils are cheap and/or the engineer/manufacturer have no clue how to build them.
I agree it doesn’t seem that ‘general’ fan or air noise is the issue. But, from a few of the posts in this thread, it seems like there might be an issue for some with mechanical fan noise (bearings?, vibration?). A few have stated if they shut the fans down or adjust speed the noise goes away. I would think coil whine would be persistent at any fan speed.
For me that was the issue. But you're right that the fan noise is what it is and it's the same and as designed for every Studio for now. But I think this thread was originally about the fan noise because it started with Apples technical specification which clearly describes the general fan noise.
Generally speaking, coil whine is pretty much a normal thing when it comes to electronics. It's just magnetism that makes certain components vibrate at sometimes audible frequencies. It can also be mitigated by insulating the coils. Many of the high-powered GPUs that get non-stop compared to the Mac Studio are super loud, noisy, and also coil whiny when under load (cf. YouTube), but they get mostly used in big, closed, sound-dampened enclosures, and the even louder fan noise often drowns it out.
Coil whine per se is not a sign of cheap manufacturing, nor does it point to components producing it being badly designed!
In the case of the Mac Studio, it might just be that the chassis is too perforated, which makes the inner noises more perceptible from the outside, than in something like a MacBook Pro or Mac Mini, which are nearly hermetically sealed in comparison.
This paired with some components being insufficiently insulated might render the coil whining more audible in the Mac Studio. If I'm not mistaken the comparative photos of both power supply boards even show one that seems more insulated than the other.
However, I think that most people simply confuse it with the fans, which seem to be louder than in something like the lower tier M1 Macs that often don't even feature active cooling. Some people might even have gotten a Mac Studio with defective fans? I mean **** happens and they seem to have gotten their units replaced.
The only time I've heard coil whining from the Mac Studio was when it performed prolonged code compilation in this video towards the end.
There is evidence that the whistle some hear is caused by the holes on the back of the unit, since covering some of them stops the sound (as reported in this thread).
There is no evidence that these machines exhibit coil whine, since despite numerous tear downs, no one has demonstrated a whine coming from the power supply.
That’s not to say some people aren’t experiencing coil whine, but there hasn’t been any actual evidence with a tear down identifying the source.
That's a theory at best. It could be that covering the holes only insulates the unit more than having them open.
Yes, there is.
In case of the Mac Studio it can practically only stem from the power supply board, where there are coils.
I would love to see a link to a source showing this, otherwise it’s just a theory.
I’m not saying it is coil whine or it isn’t coil whine, but replying “yes, there is” isn‘t actual evidence.
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And not to forget, Apple uses two different PSUs with completely different layouts in the exactly same specced machine (Max) in the same area (US).
One produced by DELTA and one by Lite-On (Rev 2).
Video in this post
Has either one been demonstrated to cause coil whine, or is it a theory that one causes whine while the other doesn’t?
He swapped the PSUs from one machine to another, so while it’s not proof that neither cause whine, it’s also not proof that either of the PSUs causes whine.
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Absolutely true.
Someone with „coil whine“ would have to pop his machine open and inspect the cause further.
This hasn‘t happened (yet), so it’s all speculation so far.
In regard of the two versions, it‘s just a likely culprit.
I know coil whine when I hear it. I know coil whine from high-end GPUs and PC motherboards, and the sound of coil whine is distinctively unique. The videos that have been linked to not just in this thread clearly exhibit coil whine. In one video, the coil whine was still audible with the fans disconnected.
Duct-taping the vent-holes is not evidence, it's anecdotal. Whoever did that might not even had the coil whine in the first place and was just annoyed by normal (!) fan noise.
That's why I am asking to distinguish. We have two sources of noise: the fans, and the coil whine. And even if the latter isn't coil whine after all, it's clearly unrelated to fan noise.
Duct-taping the vent-holes is not evidence, it's anecdotal. Whoever did that might not even had the coil whine in the first place and was just annoyed by normal (!) fan noise.
That's why I am asking to distinguish. We have two sources of noise: the fans, and the coil whine. And even if the latter isn't coil whine after all, it's clearly unrelated to fan noise.
Can you let us know the time stamp where it is shown to be coil whine? Thanks
Coil whine is bad engineering and/or bad manufacturing. It are all just excuses when someone wants to tell me something else.
But the noise and high pitch noise is caused by the fans in the Mac Studio, not by coil whine. So I don't see the need to discuss coil whine any further.
But the noise and high pitch noise is caused by the fans in the Mac Studio, not by coil whine. So I don't see the need to discuss coil whine any further.