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New Mac mini - how loud or how silent is it?

D

digitalized

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 6, 2009
4
0
The new Mac mini sounds interesting for me and I am wondering: How loud or how silent it is? Could anybody tell about her or his experience with the new mini please? So far I am using an older shuttle xpc with windows xp (pentium 4, 2.66 Ghz) and imo its quite a noisy machine. Would like to have something quiet (and also because the availabilty of the iphone dev kit only for mac), So I thought about the mini. It would be my first apple computer. A good silent choice or should I expect to deal with another loud box?

Thanks already for letting me know about your exerpience and opinions! :)
 
steveza

steveza

macrumors 68000
Feb 20, 2008
1,521
27
UK
The previous model was pretty quiet - you can't hear it across a room - and I guess that the new one is more of the same.
 
MultiFinder17

MultiFinder17

macrumors 68030
Jan 8, 2008
2,721
2,042
Tampa, Florida
I just got one of the new minis; they're next to silent. The superdrive makes a good bit of noise when you put a disk in, but other than that it's nearly silent. I love it; the external 1TB HDD I have is louder than the computer.
 
steveza

steveza

macrumors 68000
Feb 20, 2008
1,521
27
UK
fhall1 said:
If it's like the previous generation, you can't hear it from 2 feet away unless you're using an optical disk...then the Superdrive is loud.
Click to expand...
Well I can hear mine from over 2 feet away but then again a ticking wristwatch keeps me awake at night so I guess I have dog hearing or something :)
 
cleric

cleric

macrumors 6502a
Jun 7, 2008
533
0
fhall1 said:
If it's like the previous generation, you can't hear it from 2 feet away unless you're using an optical disk...then the Superdrive is loud.
Click to expand...

Yep this is my experience its nearly silent except for when using the superdrive which is substantially louder than its full size counterpart.
 
A

ADent

macrumors 6502a
Sep 9, 2007
504
0
My fans spin up when I have both cores maxed out (video re-encoding typically).

Otherwise MUCH quieter than my eMac.
 
C

clickgr

macrumors regular
Feb 20, 2009
118
1
Germany
I own both, the old and the new Mac mini. Though the old mini used to be the most silent computer I knew, now I can say the new mini is even more silent! That's because processor average temperature is lower (it barely goes above 50 deg. Celsius) due to the new low power consumption design, and thus fans operate at lower speed. Of course the difference is not huge.
 
D

david6545

macrumors member
Sep 19, 2006
36
0
clickgr said:
I own both, the old and the new Mac mini. Though the old mini used to be the most silent computer I knew, now I can say the new mini is even more silent! That's because processor average temperature is lower (it barely goes above 50 deg. Celsius) due to the new low power consumption design, and thus fans operate at lower speed. Of course the difference is not huge.
Click to expand...


Do you have the 2.0 or 2.26GHz?
 
M

Michael Belisle

macrumors member
Sep 1, 2008
56
0
College Station, TX, USA
david6545 said:
Do you have the 2.0 or 2.26GHz?
Click to expand...

I received the 2.26 GHz version today and it's silent as well. I got the temperature up to 80°C and the fans still kept blowing at a whisper-quiet 1500 RPM. I'll keep stress testing later and see when the fan actually kicks into high gear.

I also have a Late 2007 Mac mini that sounds like an turbojet taking off whenever I do anything (which disappointed me to no end). I am happy with the improvement in this generation.
 
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