G3 iMac Noise

I recently managed to acquire a Bondi Blue G3 iMac for £8, it was bit of a wreck when I got it, barely functioning with OS 9 on it. I've managed to clean it up, stuck 128Mb of RAM in it, replaced the PRAM battery, and upgraded it to OS X 10.3, and its now a functional, perfectly usable machine. It takes 2 minutes to start, which isn't too shabby.
However, it does make a lot of noise, which continues when in standby, am I correct in my assumption that this noise is the cooling fan? Is this fan replaceable, i.e. could I quiet it down by replacing the fan with a newer, low noise fan?

Odds are, if it were to break, I'd gut it, shove a 15" flat panel in there, and possibly a Mac Mini, but while it's still functional I'd like to make it as usable as possible, and given that it's currently sat in the corner of the lounge it makes a little too much noise for my liking.

Shame really, because everyone likes the Fruity iMac
I was just wondering if it was just a standard 5" case fan, so I could swap it out with an off-the-shelf one. But I suppose after it's been on for a while, it just becomes background noise and you don't notice. I'm just used to the newer ones, which are almost silent.... I've become picky

And yep, that's the plan, it's working okay now, and fortunately, I had all the parts to bring it up to date lying around (HD lying about, SODIMMs from an old laptop, and PRAM battery from my dad, who's a service engineer for a security company, and they happen to use them little batteries in wireless motion sensors, how convenient ). But if ever it were to fail irreparably, I'd gut it and replace the innards. It would be easy to replace it with a small pc, but I somehow feel it would be blasphemous to run windows on it. <_<
So mac mini it is.

Thanks for the reply anyway, I had a feeling the noise was normal, I guess I'm just not used to it.

MacHappytjg said:

theres no cooling fan in a imac g3?

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Not on the CPU itself, no. But there is a fan above it, just behind the CRT. I notice in your sig you have a slot-load, whereas I have a Rev A tray-load. Perhaps yours has no fan at all, I don't know.

Darkroom said:

i had an iMac SE 400, there was no fan, but it was damn loud after 4 or 5 years... i'm pretty sure it was the Quantum Fireball 10 GB harddrive that was making all the noise... try swapping out HDs see if that fixes your problem...

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Not a bad idea, it's only got a 4Gb HD anyway, so I'll swap it out for a 120Gb I've got lying in a drawer tomorrow morning. I'll take a look-see at the fan, too, while it's in pieces.

Right, I've replaced the hard drive with a 120Gb (The original was a 4Gb seagate mediastar). It seems to be running slightly quieter, but the majority of the noise is still coming from the fan. Whilst I had it apart I had a quick look, and it seems to be a standard case fan although I'd have to get a tape out to measure it before buying a replacement. Unfortunately, although the fan mount screws are accessible just by taking the main board tray out, it seems you have to take the whole case apart to access the cabling and connector. But, if I can replace it with a silent fan... awesome.

MacHappytjg said:

yea i upgraded mine diasticly first it had a 6gb 64mb then 128mb and 10gb when i bought it but of course nothing wrong cause the place i bought it was a reaherized seller and they referbd it so then i put ubuntu on it cause well os 9 i thought sucked but it really doesnt then just bought a 60gb hd and 512mb of ram and put osx 10.3 on it since it didnt have firewire

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Yea, when I bought mine (for £8 ) it had a 4Gb drive and 64Mb of ram. Now it has 256Mb (its actually got two 256Mb sticks in, but it's only recognising 128Mb from each), and I'm currently installing panther on the new 120Gb drive.

MacHappytjg said:

Yea, when I bought mine (for £8 ) it had a 4Gb drive and 64Mb of ram. Now it has 256Mb (its actually got two 256Mb sticks in, but it's only recognising 128Mb from each), and I'm currently installing panther on the new 120Gb drive.

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yea who knows why but it might only haave a max ram of 256 on tray im not sure but on the slot load the max ram is 1gb and 120gb hd[/quote]

From looking at the RAM sticks that were in there previously, it looks like its only detecting the chips on one side of the stick. I'm sure it supports either 512Mb or 1Gb, but 256Mb is better than 64Mb, and I'm not going out and buying more memory for an obsolete computer. So, I'm happy with it the way it is.
Just gotta try and yank this fan out now and make it quieter.
It's a significantly easier project than some guy in another thread who's trying to rip his Intel iMac apart and splice a switch into the cable bundle for the TFT, so he can turn the screen on and off.... Madness.

Nah, they're fine. They're recognised as 256Mb each in the old laptop I took them out of. Still, like I said 256Mb is good enough, not much point putting more in with only a 233MHz processor.