imac too loud for voice over?

My wife does voice over from home and it's tax write-off/new equipment upgrade time. Currently running a noisy PC setup outside of the isolation booth. We are going to move to a mac but don't know about the noise issue of having an imac in the isolation booth with the mic, so...

Is an imac quiet enough to run inside the isolation booth? If not, a mac mini will do on the "outside".

Also, does an imac support dual displays? the 21 inch won't be a large enough environment for her...(insert joke here)

Thanks in advance!

iMacs and Macs generally are INCREDIBLY quiet. You should give them a try at your local stores so you can see for yourself.

The built-in mic on an iMac isn't at all bad, but not suitable for professional work. I recommend a USB microphone (many good options to be had, I like my Blue Snowball which I got for under $100).

All Macs now support dual displays, so that's not an issue either. They mostly use mini-DisplayPort or Thunderbolt (essentially the same thing from a monitor point of view), so you'll need to get a second monitor that supports DisplayPort or an a mDP-DVI adapter.

Thanks for the reply.
Really don't like the non-optical drive of the minis or that is the route we would go and if the machine got too loud we could simply move it out of the vocal room...kind of pointless to do if there is a 20-some inch monitor attached to the whole thing.

Anyone else have any experience with imac noise inside a vocal booth?

You don't want to use an optical drive while recording for any reason, as the drive itself makes (relatively) a lot of noise.

The iMac in normal use (ie not straining the processors) is DEAD SILENT.

Depending on what you're doing, any mac that has even a little fan noise, can be picked up, depending on the mic you're using. I do voice over stuff quite often, and if I didn't isolate, it even picked up the really quiet fan on my MBP. It depends on what you're doing this for, and how crucial total silence is. I built a small box enclosure with iso foam for the mic, and face it away from the mac, and the speaker faces into the box. The fans though not seemingly loud, sometimes will come on at the wrong time

I have a new 21.5 Imac and did some voice recording with the stock mic. I could not here any fan noise. The fan noise is very very quiet on my machine but I agree if you want really good quality get a USB mic.

IDK, my meter from four feet away measures ZERO difference with my Mac Mini on or off.

tread carefully here, I should clarify. If all you're doing is merely using a consumer grade 100 dollar usb mic, then it is waaaaaaaay different than using pro gear. I use an imac at home for recording, and use different condenser ribbon etc mics and often rent very expensive mic pres, and while it may not show up on your meter, a warm iso booth will make a track unusable especially if you do more than one. I never record any tracks in the same room as the imac.

So it depends on the equipment, using a cheap consumer grade usb mic that likely has noise cancelling built in (NOT what you want for pro recording...) you likely won't have any problems. My ribbon will pick up a car 4 blocks away. I don't know what the OP is using for recording, so my comments are only for pro gear.

Ideal set up, computer outside the iso, run monitor/key/mouse into the booth.

my 2 cents. btw imac brilliant for recording. a mini with a small ssd for os/apps and firewire would be too.