How loud is the iMac under full load?

Hi,

I've got a small home studio of sorts. Its currently run by a quad core hackintosh.

I want to get a real mac but I am unable to find some info about the iMac.

You see, the problem with my quad core hackintosh, cheap & powerful it may be, is that it is really fuggin loud. I could spend the money to get a new case & fans for it, but I'd rather just save my money for a real mac

So my two options are a Mac Pro or the 3.06Ghz iMac.

I'm not exactly a professional musician, so the Mac Pro is a bit of overkill right now.

Which leads me to the iMac. And the noise it makes when under FULL load.

Is it loud at all?

wilycoder said:

Hi,

I've got a small home studio of sorts. Its currently run by a quad core hackintosh.

I want to get a real mac but I am unable to find some info about the iMac.

You see, the problem with my quad core hackintosh, cheap & powerful it may be, is that it is really fuggin loud. I could spend the money to get a new case & fans for it, but I'd rather just save my money for a real mac

So my two options are a Mac Pro or the 3.06Ghz iMac.

I'm not exactly a professional musician, so the Mac Pro is a bit of overkill right now.

Which leads me to the iMac. And the noise it makes when under FULL load.

Is it loud at all?

Click to expand...

I honestly don't think it's loud at all. I will sometimes have 5 or 6 different things going and the fan is never too loud.

Nothing like a PC (or your hackintosh) is the answer.

The iMac is very very quiet, almost silent even at full load.

It's a qualtity piece of kit. It's not a run of the mill Dell.

I have a mac pro and when i'm using it at a high capacity it is still really quiet so I would guess an Imac is also quiet.

It's silent
I can sleep in peace when I go to bed at night dling stuff.

When i bought my imac it was silent but now a year later it's making a little noise when it works. A little hum. But this hum is such that you have to listen out for it to hear it. It's still rather easy to sleep with it on doing things.

And under full load it does make a little clicking as it's accessing the hard drive as some stupidly fast speed. It's noticeable but only just.

Overall this is still much much quieter than any PC or hackintosh I've ever used.

I have a Mac Pro and it is a very quiet machine as well. It may well be the second quietest computer I have ever had - the quietest was a custom built PC made by a company that specialized in silent PCs, so it is not fair to compare it to anything else. Nonetheless, my Mac Pro is only marginally noisier. It is a real pleasure to work with.

I have built many computers, and can tell you that if you had a room full of iMac's, and one hackintosh, all you would hear would probably be the hackintosh.

what is it that makes macs so quiet?

Why cant it be achieved by a store bought or home build pc?

btw i have the latest imac and it is dead quiet. i use it for recording all the time being a feelow musician. you will have no problemos with it.

There are only a few major noise sources on computers - if you simply attend to them in the system design, the resulting machine is quiet:

Power supply - cheap ones have cheap loud fans. Better quality ones have nearly silent fans.

Case Fans - all computers these days need fans to pull air into the case and exhaust heated air out of the case. Like power supplies, cheap cases use cheap fans, which are almost always loud. More expensive cases typically use higher quality, quieter fans. Also, many higher quality cases use physically larger fans which can move the same amount of air while turning more slowly, thus more quietly. If you look at the PowerMac G5 or the Mac Pro, where the fans are easily visible, you will see that they are quite large, and revolve at fairly low rate. On my Mac Pro, iStat Pro indicates that my fans are turning at 600 to 800 RPM, depending on the fan. That is a slow and quiet rate.

CPU Cooling System. Cheap systems use cheap fans mounted on heat sinks to cool the CPU. Better systems use better quality heat sinks and more expensive, larger, quieter fans. The latest Intel CPUs help this a lot, by simply generating less heat that needs to be dissipated, thus reducing the cooling load considerably anyway.

Hard Disks. Older hard drives used to be amazingly noisy. Really cheap systems will still use lower quality noisier hard drives. Most high quality systems these days use better, nearly whisper quiet hard drives.

So, pay attention to the power supply, the case fans, the CPU cooling system and the hard drives, and you can build a nearly noiseless machine. This is what Apple is doing!