My 2.6 with the ATI card is very quiet until it really gets pushed and then the video card speaks up a bit but never noisy.
It does put out the heat however...
-mx
It does put out the heat however...
-mx
They promoted the iMac G5 as being "whisper quiet" and got slammed with complaints of loud noise.
Hard part about that is that all the components are right in front of your face. The nice thing about the mac pro is that you can tuck it under a desk.
The thing that will make a mac pro loud will be hard drives. I have all 4 bays filled and I can hear them all spinning. it isn't bad, because the read/write is really quiet. I do set them to spin down if possible, but because 2 of them are a mirrored raid, there is always a constant noise from the system. Just a slight hiss from the drives, that's all... nothing that bothers me.
i'm the pcsilentreview kind of PC user, so I'm a fanatic about noise. I'd rate my imac at a 1-2/10 scale (excellent) and the mac pro (3ghz with 1900ATI upgrade) about a 4.
It's fairly quiet but certainly not even close to silent. It doesn't bother me tremendously, but I've done better with DIY Pc in the past.
overt silencing features