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2 Hour Old MBP 15" i7... And its loud as HELL. Is something wrong with it??

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rockandroll556

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 6, 2006
37
1
So I have kinda bad luck (or great luck depending on how you look at it). I had a 2009 unibody macbook pro... the logic board failed, hard drive failed, power source failed, CD drive failed... and 2 days ago the mouse pad failed.

In a brilliant stroke of luck, rather than fixing my computer, the people at the apple store decided to give me a brand new one! **** yea! Right? I got the 2.2 i7 15" MBP with the stock 750 gig 5400 rpm HD :cool:.

So I took my old computer, backed everything up, and a couple hours ago came home with my brand new MBP. I've installed 1 program (Google chrome), and have spent 1 hour surfing the web (the extent of the use of this computer so far is visiting: chrome website, downloading chrome, reading reddit, reading gearslutz, and now macrumors).

Im in bed right now with my computer on my chest, 1 hour into owning this computer, and I noticed... This computer is wayyyy louder than my previous Macbook pro. My other computer would be pretty much silent most of the time. This one has really noticeable fan/hd/some-sort-of-hum noise, and its really annoying. Id work in huge sessions in Pro Tools and not have anywhere close to this amount of noise coming out of the computer (not saying this computer is THAT loud... its just, in comparison to my last one, its definitely quite noisy... and I have only 1 program open, and the computer is only 1 hour old!)

With all the problems I had with my previous computer, Im kinda scared/wary about this one. I really dont want to go through all those problems again (lost SOOO much data with the HD failure, not to mention the hassle of being without a computer for school/work—Im an audio engineer and work on my computer all the time).

Anyways, I was wondering... Is this normal for the new i7 computers? Should I take my computer back to the apple store tomorrow and request a new one? (I dont know if theyll be able to hear the problem in the noisy Apple store... but in bed, at night, in my quiet house, its loud!)

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated!
 
M

mackage

macrumors 6502
Apr 6, 2011
274
3
I had the 2011 2.3ghz version for a few days and noticed that the fans seemed to kick on quickly when not even doing much and seemed to be a bit louder than my 2.66ghz late 2008 MBP. My 2.66ghz is dead silent 95% of the time.

I would say if you hear more than just the fans then maybe something is wrong. You may want to check the system temps to see if they are abnormal in comparison to how hard you are working the system.
 
Macsavvytech

Macsavvytech

macrumors 6502a
May 25, 2010
897
0
rockandroll556 said:
So I have kinda bad luck (or great luck depending on how you look at it). I had a 2009 unibody macbook pro... the logic board failed, hard drive failed, power source failed, CD drive failed... and 2 days ago the mouse pad failed.

In a brilliant stroke of luck, rather than fixing my computer, the people at the apple store decided to give me a brand new one! **** yea! Right? I got the 2.2 i7 15" MBP with the stock 750 gig 5400 rpm HD :cool:.

So I took my old computer, backed everything up, and a couple hours ago came home with my brand new MBP. I've installed 1 program (Google chrome), and have spent 1 hour surfing the web (the extent of the use of this computer so far is visiting: chrome website, downloading chrome, reading reddit, reading gearslutz, and now macrumors).

Im in bed right now with my computer on my chest, 1 hour into owning this computer, and I noticed... This computer is wayyyy louder than my previous Macbook pro. My other computer would be pretty much silent most of the time. This one has really noticeable fan/hd/some-sort-of-hum noise, and its really annoying. Id work in huge sessions in Pro Tools and not have anywhere close to this amount of noise coming out of the computer (not saying this computer is THAT loud... its just, in comparison to my last one, its definitely quite noisy... and I have only 1 program open, and the computer is only 1 hour old!)

With all the problems I had with my previous computer, Im kinda scared/wary about this one. I really dont want to go through all those problems again (lost SOOO much data with the HD failure, not to mention the hassle of being without a computer for school/work—Im an audio engineer and work on my computer all the time).

Anyways, I was wondering... Is this normal for the new i7 computers? Should I take my computer back to the apple store tomorrow and request a new one? (I dont know if theyll be able to hear the problem in the noisy Apple store... but in bed, at night, in my quiet house, its loud!)

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...

Try using THIS to force Intel only.
 
R

rockandroll556

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 6, 2006
37
1
Macsavvytech said:
Try using THIS to force Intel only.
Click to expand...

I can see your specs are identical to mine (minus the backordered Vertex 3). Did you have a similar problem with noise? Ive been googling about this a lot, and seem to have narrowed it down to HD noise—its coming from the front right part of my computer, and the noise decreases significantly with pressure placed on this area of the computer.

Did you order the SSD in order to get rid of this annoying hum? Im so tuned in to hum/noise like this because of my profession... This is kinda driving me nuts!

Anyways, I appreciate the suggestion, but Im wary of installing a program that shuts off certain areas of functionality in my computer. I need stability for my work and though I once was the type of person who would "mod" my OS as much as I could/wanted, I generally try and stay away from things like that in order to prevent conflicts with Pro Tools (ESPECIALLY), Logic, Reason, etc.
 
T

Treeman574

macrumors regular
Feb 5, 2011
123
0
QLD, Australia
I have the 2.0ghz i7 and the fans are always sitting at around 2000. If you game, encode video or other high load tasks, the fans jump to around 6000.

I use smc and leave the fans around 3000-4000 normally, just because of the hot climate. Don't notice any noise otherwise.
 
S

skiltrip

macrumors 68030
May 6, 2010
2,894
268
New York
Apple 26.2 said:
I can't imagine it venting very well sitting on your chest... not to mention its weight and heat.
Click to expand...

This.

Of course the fans are gonna ramp up to ludicrous speed when you're laying in bed with it.

My 2GHz can get a little whooshy sounding when I'm running Logic or Pro Tools (at my desk). But ordinarily it's pretty darn quiet. All I hear is the hard drive spinning.

But if I was laying in bed with it I'd expect the fans to ramp up. Whenever I'm using it in a place like that, like on a bedspread or even the couch, I try to put it on a book so the back edge is hanging off and can "breathe".
 
A

applefanDrew

macrumors 65816
Jul 17, 2010
1,437
4
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

SSD will solve it.
 
NickZac

NickZac

macrumors 68000
Dec 11, 2010
1,758
8
It's likely partially the HDD...the 7500 RPM hard drive seems to be rather loud, or at least the ones I have heard I can hear.

The cooling fans also increase in RPM quicker than previous models IIRC, which is likely partially due to the processor and graphics card.
 
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