if you add photo/filters/video editing to that list, yes it'll be quiet.
except you'll use a fancy $2300 (starting from) machine just for email and browsing...
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Recent 27" iMacs are NOT silent
- Thread starter motrek
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if you add photo/filters/video editing to that list, yes it'll be quiet.
except you'll use a fancy $2300 (starting from) machine just for email and browsing...
Well, no need to be condescending. Just because you're not maxing out a computer for minutes at a time doesn't mean you're not doing anything more useful than some email and web browsing. Most of software development is a bunch of typing with bursts of compiling, and it's useful for that compiling to be fast even if it doesn't take long.
Seems like most photo editing is the same, you spend most of your time deciding what you want the software to do, vs. waiting for it to do the things...
some people buy a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or... just to drive from a to b within speed limits. Life is more than just a cost/profit tab.
I came up from 2013 iMac, i5 with 780m Nvidia graphics to an i9 Vega48 current model, the new one is a ****ing jet. Compared to running the same exact games as before this new systems is obnoxious in spinning up the fan to 2600+ Followed all the "tips" about resets/etc to no avail. The i9 logic is just wrong, it will spike out of the blue and as such the system spins fans to high hell. I have iStat so I can see temps rise here and there but it mostly is just spikes that drive it.
Very disappointed with the difference but no real choice in upgrade paths as Apple stopped apparently all updates to drivers for the 780m where an OS upgrade broke stuff. I just gave up on it and put it away and knuckled under and purchased a new machine
yea but the thread is about "imac 2019 is not silent"
i'm sure there's a lot of folk that buy an imac just for browsing, but really, don't come in here and say "yea but mine is silent". Of course it is, you're not putting load on it. Any mac is quiet when idle and doing basic desktop work. This thread's background i assume is about situations where you DO put some load on them. And yes, the 2019 is the loudest (and hottest) of them all under load on CPU/GPU. 580X reaches 95C, of course it needs full fan blast for cooling.
the thread explained to the OP is something new 😂
in fact, the vast majority of discussions here are related to the fact that iMac 2019 are not silent *in idle*/light work. I assume that we all expect (and want too) the iMac fan to be loud *when needed*.
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Except that's not true at all, though, is it?
Posts on this thread have informed people in general that if their 27" iMac is making audible noise when idle, then it's probably functioning as designed and returning/exchanging it will not correct the issue, so this thread might save some people some time and effort and possibly money. And it's possible that this thread will prevent some people from making a purchasing decision that they might regret.
Also, this thread has encouraged several people to try the hack of lowering their idle fan speed to 1000 RPM which has proven to be a viable solution to the problem of audible idle noise.
So no, peoples' options are not "suck it up or purchase something different" and this thread has already proven pretty useful to a number of people.
Your post here is about as useful as when you said your iMac was silent, but also later said that you and your wife probably have some age-related hearing loss which would prevent you from hearing noise from your iMac. So, uhh, great. Thanks for chiming in yet again.
It has indeed as I was unaware that this was even possible before I stumbled upon this thread. Lowering the fan RPMs from 1,200 to 1,000 (the lowest I can go is actually 959 rpm) made a huge difference on my 27" iMac. I can still hear it but it's definitely much less annoying because now the fan noise is not intermixed with the much quieter hum of the spinning hard drive anymore.
If you want to get rid of the hard drive noise, you could switch to an external SSD (they're cheap now) and unmount the internal drive. You'll take a performance hit (vs. the SSD part of a Fusion Drive) but depending on what you do with your computer I think you would likely not notice the difference.
Making the internal drive spin down might be a bit of a trick though. I tried to do this with an iMac about 8 years ago. Every time the computer woke from sleep, the hard drive would spin up even though it was unmounted and completely empty, and it would stay spinning for about 5 minutes before the "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" feature kicked in. The transition from spinning to not spinning was very noticeable and annoying. The hard drive would also spin up at weird, semi-random times even though it wasn't even mounted, e.g., when the "Open file" dialog box came up. Ugh.
This is the main reason it took me ~3 months of sifting through Craigslist notifications to find an iMac that I wanted to buy, almost all of them have spinning disks in them.
To be honest I don't really mind the hard drive noise. It is much quieter and less annoying than the fan noise at 1,200 rpm, and quite frankly I can't even hear it at normal distance (~2 ft). The fan was noticeable when I really needed to focus on something but the hard drive isn't so I'm fine with it. That said I am most likely going to replace it with a 2TB SSD once my AppleCare+ protection plan expires in June of 2021. Not because of noise or performance complaints but because I will need the additional storage space by then.
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Hmm. I've seen a hundred videos about replacing the hard disk in an iMac but none about removing a disk altogether. Is that possible? A potential problem, as I understand it, is that these hard disks have Apple-proprietary temperature sensors and if you don't replace the drive with a special cable from iFixit (or OWC?) then Apple's fan control logic freaks out and runs the fan at full speed all the time. And if you remove the drive altogether then obviously you wouldn't be using one of these special cables so I'd be surprised if the fan control logic would work right. Although if you're already using Macs Fan Control anyway then I guess this isn't really a problem.
You could just try switching to a cheap external SSD connected via USB 3.whatever and that eliminates the need to open the iMac. You'll be limited to 500 MB/s speeds but most things people do with computers is dependent on a drive's latency, and not its sequential read or write performance, so I think you'd likely not even notice. Unless you do a lot of video editing with high resolutions or something.
Who said anything about removing it? I'm thinking of replacing it with a 2TB drive, either SSD or hard drive, once my iMac is out of AppleCare+ warranty in June of 2021. Either that or I'll attach an external one instead, thought about that as well. Then again if I'm already out of warranty I might as well eliminate the little bit of noise remaining and get rid of the spinner altogether. We'll see. As it is I am very happy with my iMac as it is, especially now that I was able to further reduce fan noise. Whatever happens next year is future mj's problem 
dudes. OP states "recent 2019 imacs are NOT silent". well, compared to what?
2015 vs 2019 in idle/desktop work i didn't notice a difference
2015 vs 2019 in full flight, hell yes. big difference.
2019 vs imac pro? no idea, but under load probably 2019 way louder than pro
2019 vs watercooled PC? duhh.
so make up your minds and state vs. what when saying 2019s are silent or not.
and for those who don't care and recommend to suck it up, well..might as well refrain from posting. there's no added value, good or bad in your comments.
besides, OP expects a SILENT unit. Lol? even my watercooled hackintosh is audible at 800rpm. under full load
2015 vs 2019 in idle/desktop work i didn't notice a difference
2015 vs 2019 in full flight, hell yes. big difference.
2019 vs imac pro? no idea, but under load probably 2019 way louder than pro
2019 vs watercooled PC? duhh.
so make up your minds and state vs. what when saying 2019s are silent or not.
and for those who don't care and recommend to suck it up, well..might as well refrain from posting. there's no added value, good or bad in your comments.
besides, OP expects a SILENT unit. Lol? even my watercooled hackintosh is audible at 800rpm. under full load
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Who said anything about removing it? I'm thinking of replacing it with a 2TB drive, either SSD or hard drive, once my iMac is out of AppleCare+ warranty in June of 2021. Either that or I'll attach an external one instead, thought about that as well. Then again if I'm already out of warranty I might as well eliminate the little bit of noise remaining and get rid of the spinner altogether. We'll see. As it is I am very happy with my iMac as it is, especially now that I was able to further reduce fan noise. Whatever happens next year is future mj's problem
Sorry, just assumed that you were waiting until the warranty was up so you could open the computer without voiding the warranty and remove the spinning disk.
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besides, OP expects a SILENT unit. Lol? even my watercooled hackintosh is audible at 800rpm. under full load
I don't really care how much noise the computer makes under load, since my computer is under load infrequently. I said twice in my original post that I was talking about idle conditions.
I don't know why you would laugh at the idea that a computer would or should be silent when idle. My 2015 MacBook Pro is semi-passively cooled. I've owned two 11" MacBook Airs, that, while not technically silent, I couldn't hear even with my ear a few inches away from the fan. I owned a Mac Mini that was not silent but still much quieter than a 5K iMac. Now that I've done the 1000 RPM hack, it's pretty difficult for me to hear my 5K iMac, and it runs fine. But stock, the 5K iMac is loud compared to all those other computers, which is disappointing to me.
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That is not entirely wrong. I am waiting until the warranty is up to open the computer without voiding the warranty in order to remove the 1TB hard drive component of my Fusion Drive and replace it with a 2TB SSD because by the time my warranty is up in June 2021 I will need the extra space
I want to say to those who think the iMac 2019 is louder, are absolutely right.
I've been digging in another thread to find info on the Mac Pro sound output and eventually dug up some tech support pages on the Apple site that show sound output:
The iMac 2019 is the loudest whilst the 2015 is likely the quietest non-Pro. Even though the Sound Pressure level shows higher than the 2017, I would suspect Apple may have changed the operator position slightly as sound power levels are standardised, whereas operator position is not.
The iMac Pro is very quiet and is the quietest desktop machine that Apple provide (excl. Mac Mini)
Sources:
support.apple.com
I've been digging in another thread to find info on the Mac Pro sound output and eventually dug up some tech support pages on the Apple site that show sound output:
| Sound Power Levels (Bels) | Sound pressure level from operator position (dB) | |
|---|---|---|
| iMac 2019 | 2.40 | 16.0 |
| iMac 2017 | 2.30 | 15.0 |
| iMac 2015 | 2.25 | 15.5 |
| iMac Pro | 2.10 | 13.0 |
The iMac 2019 is the loudest whilst the 2015 is likely the quietest non-Pro. Even though the Sound Pressure level shows higher than the 2017, I would suspect Apple may have changed the operator position slightly as sound power levels are standardised, whereas operator position is not.
The iMac Pro is very quiet and is the quietest desktop machine that Apple provide (excl. Mac Mini)
Sources:
iMac Pro (2017) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support
I want to say to those who think the iMac 2019 is louder, are absolutely right.
I've been digging in another thread to find info on the Mac Pro sound output and eventually dug up some tech support pages on the Apple site that show sound output:
Sound Power Levels (Bels) Sound pressure level from operator position (dB) iMac 2019 2.40 16.0 iMac 2017 2.30 15.0 iMac 2015 2.25 15.5 iMac Pro 2.10 13.0
The iMac 2019 is the loudest whilst the 2015 is likely the quietest non-Pro. Even though the Sound Pressure level shows higher than the 2017, I would suspect Apple may have changed the operator position slightly as sound power levels are standardised, whereas operator position is not.
The iMac Pro is very quiet and is the quietest desktop machine that Apple provide (excl. Mac Mini)
Sources:
iMac Pro (2017) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support
Looks interesting.
Are those figures for the i5 or the most powerful CPU. Stands to reason the most powerful CPU will likely need extra cooling. Even then the figures are pretty close.I want to say to those who think the iMac 2019 is louder, are absolutely right.
I've been digging in another thread to find info on the Mac Pro sound output and eventually dug up some tech support pages on the Apple site that show sound output:
Sound Power Levels (Bels) Sound pressure level from operator position (dB) iMac 2019 2.40 16.0 iMac 2017 2.30 15.0 iMac 2015 2.25 15.5 iMac Pro 2.10 13.0
The iMac 2019 is the loudest whilst the 2015 is likely the quietest non-Pro. Even though the Sound Pressure level shows higher than the 2017, I would suspect Apple may have changed the operator position slightly as sound power levels are standardised, whereas operator position is not.
The iMac Pro is very quiet and is the quietest desktop machine that Apple provide (excl. Mac Mini)
Sources:
iMac Pro (2017) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support
Quote (2019 - from the page link given in #169):
Configuration tested: 3.7GHz 6-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB memory, 2TB Fusion drive, Radeon Pro 580X Graphics.
Which is what I have (except I've got 24GB RAM and a 512Mb SSD not a FD). I must say I've never even heard the fan, and I can hardly feel the air movement out of the exhaust vent. But I've not used it under any significant load (although I have a 2nd, 30" Dell, monitor attached) as I'm just using it to test out Catalina, whilst I'm working with an older OS on another Mac.
Configuration tested: 3.7GHz 6-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB memory, 2TB Fusion drive, Radeon Pro 580X Graphics.
Which is what I have (except I've got 24GB RAM and a 512Mb SSD not a FD). I must say I've never even heard the fan, and I can hardly feel the air movement out of the exhaust vent. But I've not used it under any significant load (although I have a 2nd, 30" Dell, monitor attached) as I'm just using it to test out Catalina, whilst I'm working with an older OS on another Mac.
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I think Apple design the fan for the highest performance chip. So there won't be any difference in idle noise between the versions. 1200 RPM will be the lowest, although the more powerful chip will spike up faster.
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Your room will generally have to be less than 30dB to hear it. Use Decibel X (iPhone app), to get an idea about your room.
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Yes, exactly. It doesn't matter which chips an iMac has when the computer is idle or idle-ish, they all use very little power, so the idle fan speed will be fixed at the minimum for all of them. Back in the early 2000s, CPUs and GPUs would use a lot of power (and thus require a lot of cooling) when idle, but not anymore.
To me, it's almost kind of irrelevant how much noise an iMac makes when it's not idle, because it's so loud. The cooling system is an embarrassment compared to any normal desktop PC. It's one relatively small heatsink and one relatively small fan. Not a whole lot better than a laptop. It doesn't seem like anybody should be buying an iMac in order to run it under load for any significant amount of time.
I was watching a report on UK TV the other night which stated the only reliable way to test noise was with an officially approved decibel meter which one had to be trained to use. It went on to say the phone app equivalent are notoriously unreliable. For me my 2019 27 inch 5K i5 remains the quietest iMac of the three I have owned.