New 13 inch Macbook Air Fan Noise

My i5 13" is as quiet as a mouse.

Well, MBP owners had heat issues with Sandy Bridge. Let's hope it's just indexing, and will settle out in due time.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2764570?start=0&tstart=0

I'm also having no noise problems at all with my i5 13" MBA

Dead. Silent.

When I installed Lion yesterday the fans kicked on like crazy. Normally they only ever ran when I watched HD video via Youtube, iTunes, Hulu etc. With the lone exception being Amazon's video on demand service which never kicked on the fans. Apparently the fans had come on due to the indexing. Once that was completed, the fans are now seemingly back to normal but they do come on sooner than before when watching videos. But this probably has something to do with Apple's childish treatment of Flash in Lion. When your fans are on high like that, go into the activity monitor and see which program is using the most resources.

One of the main reasons I opted for the i5 instead of the i7.

Have any other i7 buyers had problems with this?

really need some help here

Thanks,
Swayne

back to top, any more i7 experiences????

My 11 inch i7 is all fan all the time. Uh oh. Cupertino, I think we have a problem.

Higher CPU = more heat generated = more fans.

I would be interested to see what everyone is using to do that. Like most I bet you're watching flash video's.

I am so much more comfortable with my slightly slower but quieter than a mouse i5 MacBook Air now. Maybe they'll find a firmware update, but I'm pleased enough with the i5 to not want to upgrade.

This thread is making me anxious about my i7 13", due to be delivered on August 4th :/ I had planned to underclock it but apparently Coolbook doesn't support SB.

jwkitche said:

Just got the i7 Air and the fan came on immediately. Loud and continuous. I have an 11 inch (prior model) that is dead silent. Also, my Macbook Pro (2010 17 inch) is dead silent.

Is this a known issue with the air or is something wrong?

Click to expand...

Processes that are using a lot of the processor are what causes heat buildup which is what causes the fan to run.

Anytime that happens, you can launch the Activity Monitor program, set it to show "All Processes", then sort it by the "% CPU" column. Simply look for the processes using the most CPU (as that's what's generating the heat).

The first time you turn on a Mac (or upgrade an existing Mac to a new OS), Spotlight runs and indexes the drive. You won't see this process running in your Dock, but it can generate some heat, and take awhile to finish. So that might have been it.

Either way, reboot your new Air, and if the fan starts running again, try the Activity Monitor thing and see what process is causing it.

Something else you can do, if you don't want to wait for the fans to come on, is start the Activity Monitor application, then going into View > Dock Icon > Show CPU History. Then down on your Dock, you'll have a graph always showing you how busy your CPU is. Anytime it spikes (like in the example below), you can double-click on the Dock icon and see what's going on.

my fan hasn't started but I've only used safari. i got the i7 13in

I got mine 13" i7 today from Apple Store. So far so good.

My MBA stays around 45~52 C, but 7x~93 C while importing an movie into iMovie and the fan will start spinning to 6xxx rpm. However, it cools down to 4x C as quickly as job be done in 10 secs. The cooling system is efficient in this generation.

Open Activity Monitor (in Utilities folder) and select "All Processes" instead of "My Processes" in the toolbar. Then, sort by % CPU descending. I'd hazard a guess it's mdworker indexing for Spotlight.

It's probably spotlight indexing.

same here Silent even when i tried a 1080p youtube test was quite silent

daza1000 said:

same here Silent even when i tried a 1080p youtube test was quite silent

Click to expand...

Do you have a MBA i5 or i7 ?

jwkitche said:

Just got the i7 Air and the fan came on immediately. Loud and continuous. I have an 11 inch (prior model) that is dead silent. Also, my Macbook Pro (2010 17 inch) is dead silent.

Is this a known issue with the air or is something wrong?

Click to expand...

as already mentioned it's probably indexing or whatever, though it does seem unusual.

you could try resetting the SMC first

and then maybe run this sequence in Terminal, one line at a time:

sudo chown root:admin /
sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

fa.ce said:

Do you have a MBA i5 or i7 ?

Click to expand...

13" baseline what a computer i like it even more than my 2010 mba 11

Just purchased the 13" ultimate. I'll be testing this out. If it gets hot or too loud I'll be exchanging for i5.