Imac temperature and fan speeds

[mfrench]

I just recently bought an imac computer and my two friends who know a lot about apple computers thought that the fans and temperature might be a little high. The cpu fan at idle runs at just under 1200 rpm's, the harddrive fan runs at 1100 rpm's and the optical drive fan runs at 1000 rpm's. The temperature itself 40-44°c. The other imac that they know of is a year old, so we weren't sure if there were newer upgrades that might be making the difference between our speeds and temperature compared to that one.

[spinnerlys]

Those are normal temperatures and fan speeds.

[TMRaven]

My iMac G5's cpu idles at 65 c and its fans at 1700 rpm. You're fine.

[aki]

there are lots and lots and lots of threads on this but more or less

your cpu is fine way up to the 70s+ (i forget what the "max" is), as long as you don't find it hanging up there at those temp for days on end, no problem (40s is fine)

the other thing to watch is your HD temps, which can get high in the imac form factor. if your HD is hanging around 50C or more for extended periods, you are shaving days off the lifespan of your HD. If you backup regularly, and/or if you upgrade your hardware regularly, you may not have to think about this. If you want your imac/HD to last a bit longer, then its wise to just keep an eye on HD temps esp if you game a lot or do heavy lifting eg. video processing for long periods.

finally, if you use bootcamp, be aware that gaming in bootcamp will send temps up and temp management under bootcamped windows is not good.

standard imac solutions are: iStat/iStat Pro (for temp monitoring); smcfancontrol (to manually set higher fan speeds - this will work for bootcamp too)

[gb1631]

My iMac i7:

HD: 49c
CPU: 43c
Optical Drive: 50c
Power Supply: 68c

Fans:

Optical Dr.: 1060
HD: 1098
CPU: 938