can you hear your Imac fan?

[Diraklib]

I have an early 2009 Imac. A year ago it would have strange colors on ths screen and then freeze. Sometimes the mouse would still work, but eventually everything would freeze and I would have to reboot.

I took the imac in to my local apple repair place here in Almaty KZ and they told me it was the hard drive and replaced the original 600gb with 1tb drive. The problem did not go away. I noticed that the problem occurred when the Imac had been running for a while - hot. I dealt with the problem for awhile, but then just got fed up and decided to "risk" having it repaired again...

Back the the local apple repair store.... they ran all the diagnostics and then started switching out hardware to see when and why the mac was freezing and crashing. Finally they told me it was the video card... Ok, well replace it please... sorry, but we have to send your bad video card to Europe and then they will send us a replacement - we aren't allowed to keep anything in stock... So I ordered one from the US and am about to have it installed. But before I do... just a quick question - Can YOU hear YOUR Imac fan?

Your answer will help me decide if;

- my local shop switched out my perfectly good and perfectly silent fan for one that makes variable noise depending on how hot it gets

- the tech at my local shop inadvertently did something that caused my non-working (and therefore completely silent) fan to all of a sudden start working

Other considerations;

- My Imac crashes less often - like 1/3 as much now that this fan is audible (working?)

Additional question;
- should I demand that my local shop re-install my silent working fan?
- should I go ahead and replace the video card?
- could my video card have originally gone bad because my fan did not work?

Thanks,
db

 

[SpectreOne3]

I had an issue in my 2011 iMac where I could here the drive fan. The fan had a busted bearing so Apple swapped it out, problem solved.

Can't speak on the other issues as I haven't experienced them.

 

[omvs]

Don't know about the 2009, but on the 2011 I don't hear the fan normally. If I've been gaming for a while they will get audible - not annoyingly so, but enough one can tell there is a fan blowing air.

I'd check your system temperatures (like with iStat menu or other similar progarm) and see what the fan rpm's are and what the temps are. My fans normally run ~1000-1200rpm when idle. Doing video encoding or other intensive CPU operations will bump it up a bit - maybe 1500rpm, but still pretty quiet. The GPU will really heat things up for me - gaming under OSX/windows I'll get in the 2000-25000.

If there's something wrong with the machine and the fanspeed is getting in the 4-5k range, it'll be REALLY loud. But that only happened to me when I broke a cable in my machine and the system got confused.

 

[DianeK]

I have never heard the fan in my 2011 iMac. And there were times it felt quite hot when working with large Photoshop files but there was no fan noise. Maybe the fan wasn't working??