Mac mini fan noise

Hi,

I recently did an upgrade to a mac mini. I'll admit I didn't REALLY know what I was doing, but I felt like a new hobby.

I bought a Core Solo mini, and put a 2.16Ghz Core Duo in it, with 2Gigs of ram a 500GB HDD and Snow leopard. Things are mostly fine.

The problem is that the fan comes on loudly every now and again. I downloaded a prefpane that monitors the CPU temp and lets you adjust when the fan comes on.

The fan CPU is usually around 55-58 C, and the fan is 2000-2500 rpm (while film watching). When idle, the fan is not on (so I know it's not the fan control connection people commonly leave unplugged).

Anything I can do to make the fan quieter?


Thanks

Something's not right because the CPU fan should be spinning at all times. Normal rotation of the fan at CPU idle should be around 1800 RPM. It will of course (if the temperature sensors are correctly calibrated) ramp up as the CPU works harder - as when viewing on line videos.

But I definitely would be concerned if the fan is not spinning or coming on until the temperature rises. As I said above it should be rotating at all times.

Yeah- my mistake. While idle it's actually around 1800 RPM, which is effectively silent.

I've left it idle for a while, and have been monitoring the temperature with smcFanControl. It seems to stay constant, around 40 C with the fan operating at around 1800 RPM. This seems normal.

However every 5-10 minutes there will be a sudden burst of fan activity, with the speed shooting up to 5500 RPM. After around 30 seconds the fan will return to it's usual pace. What could be causing this?

OK, thanks for clarifying. The sudden ramping up of the Fan could be due to some process going on. Open up your Activity Monitor.app and watch for any unusual activity or process when the fan ramps up to 5500 RPM. Let us know what (if any) it is and we'll try to figure out how to stop it.

Doesn't appear to be any increase in CPU activity, temperature, RAM usage, HDD usage etc. Everything is just sitting idle.

OK, then that probably leaves us with a hardware issue. It could be something as simple as a thermal sensor not working correctly or perhaps has come loose from the logic board. If you feel up to it, open the Mini again and do a visual check of the logic board. Make sure all the sensors are in place and not loose. If a temperature sensor is acting up, you may be able to replace it. Use the photos and directions at iFixit: The free repair manual to locate the sensors.

Right so I opened it up again, but I couldn't really find on iFixit a map of where the sensors are. I also couldn't find anything that was loose, or anywhere where it looks like something was missing. Any other suggestions?