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The new iMac is a lot noisier!
- Thread starter Darajavahus
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Can you share the dB values you measured?
The fan noise of my iMac goes up to 73 dB in idle.
Apple store guy told me the 2017 iMac models are just loud and there's nothing wrong with it but he listened to my iMac in the store with 30 people in the store and music playing....
Well, sofar I'm not thinking about returning the iMac. I believe I can get used to the noise.
What I was aming at are physical measures we can take to mute the noise. The sound is/must be the result of the aerodynamics. I think the placement and the shape of the ventilation grille is crucial on this. Also I noticed that even touching the stand of the iMac mutes the noise a tiny little bit.
Well, that's my 2 cents.
By the way : would it be possible/likely for Apple to change the behaviour of the fan in a future version of the firmware?
Been using my new i7 1tb ssd at work for the past few days. This thing is quiet pretty much all the time except for final output. When export in Premiere or render in After Effects or Cinema 4d, the fans rev up and they are noticeably loud. This is usually when I take off my headphones and step away from my computer to stretch or get a drink.
I don't know how working in something like Logic with a lot of tracks hammering away at the CPU would affect the fan. But for my workflow, it's pretty much single thread dependent until I have to do final output, and the iMac is quiet throughout. The screen and lovely crisp text are so nice and worth it (although I have to turn the brightness WAY down!).
I am now spoiled on SSDs. The iMac 1tb drive is so much faster than my old sata ssd in my PC. It's fantastic.
Photoshop work, web browsing, MS office, editing video, color correcting, tweaking animation in the graph editor, I do not notice the fan at all. I have not tried final cut pro yet.
I would probably notice this more at home in my quiet office, where I currently have the constant drone of my old PC and its 3x140mm and 2x200mm fans.
I'm still on the fence about getting one for home, as learning Cinema 4d is my driving factor there. GPU rendering is expensive on the iMac with all the enclosures adding $250-300 for each GPU. And apple's egpu implementation in High Sierra is currently locking out nvidia.
For less than a cost of an eGPU and 1080ti, I could build a Ryzen 1700 mini ITX render slave for CPU bound rendering and pair it with an iMac which gets an almost 1000 CB score (lower on subsequent frames and the processor heats up). Then again, I could build a monster PC with 12-32 threads and a 1080ti for less than the price of the iMac.
I don't know how working in something like Logic with a lot of tracks hammering away at the CPU would affect the fan. But for my workflow, it's pretty much single thread dependent until I have to do final output, and the iMac is quiet throughout. The screen and lovely crisp text are so nice and worth it (although I have to turn the brightness WAY down!).
I am now spoiled on SSDs. The iMac 1tb drive is so much faster than my old sata ssd in my PC. It's fantastic.
Photoshop work, web browsing, MS office, editing video, color correcting, tweaking animation in the graph editor, I do not notice the fan at all. I have not tried final cut pro yet.
I would probably notice this more at home in my quiet office, where I currently have the constant drone of my old PC and its 3x140mm and 2x200mm fans.
I'm still on the fence about getting one for home, as learning Cinema 4d is my driving factor there. GPU rendering is expensive on the iMac with all the enclosures adding $250-300 for each GPU. And apple's egpu implementation in High Sierra is currently locking out nvidia.
For less than a cost of an eGPU and 1080ti, I could build a Ryzen 1700 mini ITX render slave for CPU bound rendering and pair it with an iMac which gets an almost 1000 CB score (lower on subsequent frames and the processor heats up). Then again, I could build a monster PC with 12-32 threads and a 1080ti for less than the price of the iMac.
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I don't have all the numbers from my test anymore, but on idle the 2017 iMac was averaging about 35db, where the 2009 iMac was 30db.
Here it's about 33 db.
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By the way: did you try resetting the SMC?
Yes, multiple times. No success unfortunately. Still vacuum cleaning with my imac.
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Ok thanks!
Did you measure the loudness from behind the iMac near the fan or from what position?
I measured 73 dB about 4 inches from the fan and 36 dB when I was about 8 inches away from the the front of the screen but I guess the screen itself blocked most noise as I pointed the mic my measuring device at the screen.
I measured it from below the iMac where the base is. Also a foot away from the front and about 6" away from the back by the fan area.
Thank you. so, you measured from multiple positions and calculated the average loudness, right?
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May I ask you as well from what position / distance you measured the fan noise?
I would think the most useful measurement would be from 2 ft. in front of the screen at mid screen height, and noting if the iMac is backed against a reflective wall or open space behind it.
This would attempt to reveal the noise directed at the users ears in the normal operating position.
This would attempt to reveal the noise directed at the users ears in the normal operating position.
On the foot of the stand, directly under the Apple logo.
Hi everyone! I not shure wether to buy the i5 3.8 580 or the i5 3.5 575. The heaviest load I would put on the machine would come from games, that’s why I think the i5 3.8 580 would he the better choice because of the better gpu. But I am a bit worried about the fan noise. My current MBP 2014 i7 2.5GHz will ramp up the fans after 1 minute of playing Minecraft with shaders which is pretty annoying. Does anyone have fan rpm data from the i5 3.8 running different games? I would think that fan rpm up to 1800 is not too annoying?
The noise of the fan is from the i7 not from the 580. If you plan to game the 580 is a better choice and if you are worried about noise just avoid the i7.
I don't think rpm will reach 1800 on the i5 if you are not using a custom fan profile.
So I've read through all the 37 pages...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to have gathered the following:
- no matter i5 or i7, all of these have the fans running at 1200 rpm under no load
- none of them are *completely* silent in a quiet room - there will always be a very slight air rush, even with i5-7500 despite some users claiming it's completely quiet---but that's supposedly because a) they are not in a completely noiseless environment b) their external drives may be masking the iMac's fan noise?
- i5-7500 is pretty much guaranteed to run cool even under heavy load
- i5-7600 and 7600k may rev the fans a bit after extensive time under high load, correct?
I'm still on the fence about 7600 and 7600k: I would like a quiet machine but then I wouldn't mind if occasionally the fans revved up a bit under heavy load (like performing a heavy task of decoding or sth, which I don't plan to do often anyway). It would bother me, however, if the fans revved while playing YouTube vids or performing other smaller tasks (like browsing through thumbnails of pics).
For example, on my current MBP (in my siggy) the fans would usually rev when watching a HD video. I believe someone mentioned that the revs on his 7600k go up while watching 8k videos on YouTube? Would that happen on a 7600 as well? (perhaps EugW could chime in?)
On my MBP sometimes the fans rev even when closing and reopening Chrome with 10+ tabs etc, which is kind of annoying. I suppose this wouldn't be the problem on 7600 & 7600k?
I'll be using my iMac for browsing (lots of tabs), iTunes, Pixelmator (maybe Photoshop in the future), Reason/Garageband, watching movies, some AAA gaming on Bootcamp (and possibly on MacOS as well), which is why I've been considering the 7600k option with Radeon 580 if I wanted to play at 1440p. I can get the latter for cca. $190 more than the 7600 one, so do you think it's worth it? Or rather go with 575 and buy an eGPU in a few years if needed?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to have gathered the following:
- no matter i5 or i7, all of these have the fans running at 1200 rpm under no load
- none of them are *completely* silent in a quiet room - there will always be a very slight air rush, even with i5-7500 despite some users claiming it's completely quiet---but that's supposedly because a) they are not in a completely noiseless environment b) their external drives may be masking the iMac's fan noise?
- i5-7500 is pretty much guaranteed to run cool even under heavy load
- i5-7600 and 7600k may rev the fans a bit after extensive time under high load, correct?
I'm still on the fence about 7600 and 7600k: I would like a quiet machine but then I wouldn't mind if occasionally the fans revved up a bit under heavy load (like performing a heavy task of decoding or sth, which I don't plan to do often anyway). It would bother me, however, if the fans revved while playing YouTube vids or performing other smaller tasks (like browsing through thumbnails of pics).
For example, on my current MBP (in my siggy) the fans would usually rev when watching a HD video. I believe someone mentioned that the revs on his 7600k go up while watching 8k videos on YouTube? Would that happen on a 7600 as well? (perhaps EugW could chime in?)
On my MBP sometimes the fans rev even when closing and reopening Chrome with 10+ tabs etc, which is kind of annoying. I suppose this wouldn't be the problem on 7600 & 7600k?
I'll be using my iMac for browsing (lots of tabs), iTunes, Pixelmator (maybe Photoshop in the future), Reason/Garageband, watching movies, some AAA gaming on Bootcamp (and possibly on MacOS as well), which is why I've been considering the 7600k option with Radeon 580 if I wanted to play at 1440p. I can get the latter for cca. $190 more than the 7600 one, so do you think it's worth it? Or rather go with 575 and buy an eGPU in a few years if needed?
I have the top end i7 with a 1tb SSD, and it’s much quieter than both my 2012 (top end with fusion drive) and even the 4K iMac (5500rpm drive) was.
I skimmed through these posts, and some of these “noise” complaints sound like people who are trolling or never owned a computer before. They have fans. If you run professional apps or games, they turn on. That’s a good thing.
I will add a bit more info. It has nothing to do with Apple. Intel is using garbage TIM and there's a considerable gap between the die and IHS. That's why people delid their cpus on PC. It started with Ivy Brige. Sandy Bridge cpus were fine. If you delid the temps will drop considerably. Apple should offer a discount.
https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i7-7700k-delid-performance-tests/
https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i7-7700k-delid-performance-tests/
Exactly. Intel seriously dropped the ball here, and Apple should demand better quality from Intel.
It's quite unfortunate. The only solution is to delid or undervolt. Luckily, I use my PC for gaming and iMac for everything else so it's not an issues for me.
True. For my environment I never hear it, but there is some slight ambient noise. If it was completely silent I might be able to hear it, at least if I sat closer.
We have one guy here who ran Plex for hours doing trancoding and the 7500 stayed silent for him.
I could get my 7600 up moderately (1800-2000 IIRC) after about a dozen minutes of full load but not to max (2700 rpm). Some people have had similar results with the 7600K, but I think it may have to do with the specific chip, since in some PC reviews, the 7600K did run hotter than the 7600.
The 7600K probably would be fine for you. In fact, with most regular usage, the 7700K was fine too. It's just that with say 1 minute of a video encode the fan would rev up and that bothered me. So even just exporting a version of a short video of my young kids would rev up the fan and it got to be annoying. This never happens with the 7600, but it takes a bit longer to encode.
I guess it would depend upon how long the video was, but I never watch 8K videos anyway.
This never happens on my 7600. In fact, I'd be surprised if it happened much on the 7700K.
In your shoes I'd get the 7600K, but others might even get the 7700K. I wouldn't consider the 7600 in your situation, because of the slower GPU. For me the 7600 is perfect though, since I don't use the GPU much.
I use my i7 iMac for both occasional gaming and everything else and it's not an issue for me either. I'm not seeing these runaway temperatures people like to write about in here.
As for delidding a CPU in an iMac, I can't say as that would ever be prudent. I'm not undervolting either.
My experience is similar. I have the i7/4.2 GHz with 2TB SSD, and it is dead quiet most of the time. For normal tasks that I do, like web, email, calendar, word processing, and some photo work, the fans never come on, and you could hear a pin drop in my office. Only when I hit a web page with a lot of resources or video on it do the fans spin up, and even then it is only occasionally.
You won't see the runaway temperatures unless you install a temp monitor. With that you'll see the temps spike very, very quickly. It's common knowledge, and according to Intel, it's also normal behaviour for the i7-7700K.
However, in actual usage the fans won't rev up to a loud speed unless the temps stay high for a little while. A split second spike is not enough to cause this.
The difference with the i5 models though is that the fans will essentially never rev up just due to a web page.
ie. The difference between the i5s and the i7 is never vs occasionally (unless you're talking about playing a ten minute 8K YouTube clip or something like that).
I am a happy owner of an Imac 27 "- 16 GB - Ati Pro 570 - Retina 5K.
the computer is really very performing and fulfilling but, during normal use, it sounds like a fan that is cricket.
this type of sound increases when using a game. During normal use I have to approach my ear to hear this noise while, when I’m playing, it becomes easier to hear it. unfortunately it seems that, in greater or smaller measure, is a common problem for all new Imac.
the computer is really very performing and fulfilling but, during normal use, it sounds like a fan that is cricket.
this type of sound increases when using a game. During normal use I have to approach my ear to hear this noise while, when I’m playing, it becomes easier to hear it. unfortunately it seems that, in greater or smaller measure, is a common problem for all new Imac.