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philipma1957

macrumors 603
Apr 13, 2010
6,362
248
Howell, New Jersey
What you are really missing is the fact that it is a "gaming pc" which probably means he has a decent video card that probably has giant fans on them. For gaming, there are SOME video cards that make reduced noise, but in the end Video cards are probably what is really making all the noise (and possibly some cheap case fans as well).

I have 4 external hard drive cases that each house 4 hard drives in my office. Even with a fan in each case I barely notice all 16 of those hard drives, but I do notice the fans from my two video cards in my Mac Pro.


one of the best video cards 7970 can be made very close to silent with this heat sink

http://www.prolimatech.com/en/products/detail.asp?id=1672 and two of these fans

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835999007

Really beautiful set up! My desk is such a mess! I think this is on par with he new imac for form factor.

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Sometimes the more powerful graphics cards have fans on them so it's not just the HD that can make noise on a pc.


yeah I have lots of 7970s they are loud but are very good for graphics.

Errr, yes!

What do you think is different from a Mac Mini with an SSD and a PC with an SSD? They both tend to have fans, though it is possible to make your PC fanless. Try that with a Mac Mini. :D

Without a moving hard drive, and with low RPM fans, the PC is silent.

Mac Mini's still will rev up their fans when they get going, so in a way the PC wins.

Don't get me wrong, Mac Mini's are cool (thinking of grabbing a 2012!), I just thought it was weird the OP complained about his PC hard drive chugging away, while the Mini makes no noise. Then he explains he put an SSD in the Mini.

That's like complaining your car "just won't drive", though you fail to mention you never put any gas in it.


I have a few pc's and a few mini's they serve different uses. a mac pro with proper mods to the video card is the only quiet mac for gaming. the op is being a bit unfair talking about a gaming pc and a mini in the same way.
 

bjm2660

macrumors 6502
Jun 7, 2011
332
0
Virginia
Night and Day difference visually/aesthetically.

Some want to keep their Windows computing separate so as not to "taint" their Apple product. I don't necessarily buy into this, but I've heard folks talk about it.
 

Mr. Retrofire

macrumors 603
Mar 2, 2010
5,064
518
www.emiliana.cl/en
I have a desk here in my home office with a PC on the left and my Mac mini on the right. As I sit here typing this, my PC has been grinding away at the HD for about an hour now doing god-knows-what (nothing is running but background programs) while my mini is totally silent, as usual. Between the PC fans and the constantly reading/writing HD, my PC is becoming more and more annoying.

At any rate, just some random musings about why I love my Mac!
One problem today is the loudness of 7200 rpm drives (direct and indirect noise). Some users say they need them. In many cases they do not need such a overheating, noisy HDD, which btw is not much faster than a 5400 rpm HDD. They need a SSD (the Samsung 830 or 840 Pro, for example), which is silent and fast. Other problems are unnecessary large and/or inefficient power supplies and “big” GPUs, which are not necessary for “normal” work. The Mac mini does not have these problems.

Thank God! :)
 

eizen

macrumors member
Nov 18, 2012
40
6
How's the noise of the Fusion Drive? Does the machine still feel pretty silent?
 

Talon Six

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 5, 2012
68
0
The Gulf Coast
To shed some more light on my PC situation, it's in a 2 year old gaming case with two huge case fans in the top and front and two smaller fans in the rear. The graphics card also has two fans, as does the power supply and the CPU. Noise was never a consideration for me until I experienced how quiet a reasonably powerful computer (my mini) can be.

The noise that I was originally writing about, however, was that read/write scratchy sound (don't know how else to describe it) that was just going on for what seemed like an eternity.

Don't get me wrong, Mac Mini's are cool (thinking of grabbing a 2012!), I just thought it was weird the OP complained about his PC hard drive chugging away, while the Mini makes no noise. Then he explains he put an SSD in the Mini.

That's like complaining your car "just won't drive", though you fail to mention you never put any gas in it.

Yes, my mini has an SSD, but it also has the standard 5400 RPM HDD as a media drive. It doesn't ever read/write/grind for an hour like my PC does. It didn't before the SSD and it certainly doesn't now with the SSD as the boot drive.

My point was that yesterday my PC was up to something that sounded extremely labor intensive, but nothing immediately obvious was going on. I equate it to when I can hear my 8-year old making a racket in a room in another part of the house. When I ask what he's doing, his answer is invariably "Nothing daddy!"

In the future when I build my next PC I'll look at the silent cases that some of the posters mentioned.
 
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FreakinEurekan

macrumors 603
Sep 8, 2011
5,428
2,499
The silence is golden! I had a Dell mini tower and a mid-2007 Mac Mini. I replaced both with the new 2.6GHz Mini with Fusion Drive, using VMWare Fusion 5 to virtualize the Win7 Dell onto the Mac. It's AMAZINGLY quiet in my office now!
 

scotttnz

macrumors 6502a
Dec 16, 2012
817
3,383
Auckland, New Zealand
The near silence was one of the factors in my decision to replace my home built PC with a Mac Mini -my first Mac.

Yes it is possible to build a quiet small form factor PC for the same price or less than a similarly configured Mac mini, but I was ready for a change from Windows. I'm bored of Windows 7, and not keen on Windows 8.
 

cmafra

macrumors newbie
Dec 12, 2012
3
0
Adelaide, Australia
Disagree. A mac mini is not silent if you dont use SSD.

I just got my late 2012 mini yesterday, i7 2.6, 16gb RAM and regular HD boot up for the 1st time the HD noise was ridiculous like RRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....


I used this forum, fixit guide plus a new m4 ssd, carbon copy cloner v 3.5 and in 1 hour my mac mini was transformed into a nice quiet machine.


So basically SSD in a mac mini is the difference between heaven and hell in terms of noise.
 

motrek

macrumors 68030
Sep 14, 2012
2,613
305
I have a desk here in my home office with a PC on the left and my Mac mini on the right. As I sit here typing this, my PC has been grinding away at the HD for about an hour now doing god-knows-what (nothing is running but background programs) while my mini is totally silent, as usual. Between the PC fans and the constantly reading/writing HD, my PC is becoming more and more annoying. ...

It is nice. I spent a couple of weeks last year quieting down my PC and got it to the point where it was basically as quiet as a Mini in all circumstances (including 100% CPU and GPU load). The only moving parts ended up being the hard drive (loudest component by far) plus a 12cm CPU fan and a 12cm exhaust fan, both running at a constant 750 RPM. Nice, but a lot of work, and it's still a mid-size ATX case, i.e., giant compared to a Mini...
 

Exodist

macrumors member
I have a desk here in my home office with a PC on the left and my Mac mini on the right. .........................
Nice setup. I use a small light behind my monitor also. The ambient light keeps the room easy on the eyes while still being able to use the keyboard without buying a backlite KB. (I owned almost a dozen I was never happy with).

I just traded down on my monitor. My 39" LED LCD will now be the house TV after we move and I already gave my 27" LCD to my daughter since it has 2 HDMI ports. So I just got me a 23" LCD for my mini. Gonna have to get a KVM switch of some kind for my mini and PC to share my KB/Mouse without issues. My PC is one I built. Have had so many issues trying to balance cooling -vs- quietness. Think this battle has costed me almost 200 bucks experimenting. Finally think I got it balanced enough, but with 2 video cards when playing games its NOT quiet. Which is why your post got my attention. My mini is sooo quiet compared to my PC.. LOL Gonna take my SSD out of my PC and stick it in my Mini to further along its performance and silence.. :)

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So basically SSD in a mac mini is the difference between heaven and hell in terms of noise.
Still using the base HDD in mine. Its silent, every so often you may here the R/W head move when the room is very quiet like late at night. Yours may have been borderline defective.
 

VanCleef2012

macrumors newbie
Jan 27, 2012
23
0
I have to disagree with the quiet part, and yes I have upgraded to an SSD. Its just the fan rpm goes so high its like a jet turbine on my desk. I have the AMD 6630m gpu with a 27' monitor and when I have Diablo 3 or CS:GO running the jet turbines kick in lol. Even 1080p youtube videos with multiple tabs open cause it to flare up sometimes. And don't get me started about Tumblr pages:rolleyes:
 

beyond

macrumors member
Jun 17, 2009
63
0
Got mine today. My god, it really is super extra silent:D
Even with the fusion drive.
 
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