I'm used to iMacs, Mac Minis and Macbooks, so I'm now considering a Mac Pro - is it as silent as the others dor do you hear the fan?
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Is Mac PRO Noisy?
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X2 on that... it's a VERY quiet machine. Even when I'm cranking away with Handbrake and using the machine for other tasks at the same time, it's whisper quiet. My 24" iMac was a tad quieter, but only a very small tad.
Yeah, they're very quiet, but not silent. Though, I've probably only noticed because I use mine in a recording studio.
Agree superdrive is like the thing is going into hyperspace mode, else it's pretty darn quiet. I've owned "quiet" pcs before and was a silentpcreview kinda guy before i bought my macs, so I'm noise sensitive.
the imacs are quieter, however.
When it boots it's very loud for a few secs - the fans all spin up.
the imacs are quieter, however.
When it boots it's very loud for a few secs - the fans all spin up.
I have my entire worstation 12 inches from my ear on an Elfa system and I cannot hear the fan at all. But , as another poster said " Sounds like a jet engine when the super drive takes off" but thats just a coolness factor
The fans are controlled by software to operate at only the lowest speed needed. It's very, very quiet.
It's a lot louder than people saying. The iMac is essentially silent, whereas you can can hear the Mac Pro from a good distance. The giant 120mm fans themselves are silent (so there's no whirring sound), because they operate at a really low RPM. However the sheer volume of air that they push around does make a bit of sound.
I'm somewhat surprised the damn thing doesn't hover when having firmware upgraded, as it makes every single fan run at 100%
My Early 08 Mac Pro is on my desk about a foot from my monitor. It's extremely quiet. The only things that make noise are the hard drives and the optical drives.
Huh there actually are people who put the tower on the desk, I thought that was just a rumor.
You don't hear the fan at all. Not even as it overheats and catches on fire.
There's actually some truth in that. Their fan speed management is not functioning properly in any of the Mac Pro models - though I don't know about the ones released today yet.
The good news is that if you actually use you Mac Pro hard then you can install a free program called smcFanControl and set it so that your drives don't run at 55C.
Which fan do you mean? The Mac Pro's got a whole bunch of fans, not just one. (And I do mean cooling fans, not fanatics, hm.)
But to answer your question: When you're used to iMacs, Minis and Macbooks only, you will find that the Mac Pro is a very loud machine in comparison.
For a computer of its caliber, it is a quiet machine, especially when compared to a Dell Precision workstation. But you can clearly hear the cooling fans all the time and when you're sensitive to noise - as my girl friend and I am - the continuous humming sound of the Mac Pro can become quite annoying. But I think that's the price that one has to pay for that kind of computing power.
There are some companies that sell noiseless PCs - and take that literally: they are noiseless. No cooling fans, only passive cooling. They're huge and heavy, but they don't produce any noise whatsoever. Bruce "Thinking in Java" Eckel uses such a machine. But I'm afraid they are well beyond most people's pay grades; it's somewhere around four times what a Mac Pro costs.
When you own a Mac Pro, putting the machine on the desk actually makes a lot of sense: It is much quieter for your ears, because the machine emits most of the sound upwards. (No, I'm not kidding.) So when you have the machine under your desk, chances are that you will suffer more from its noise level.
I'll take a little itty bitty tiny bit of noise over losing a metric ass-hectare of desk space.
I am sitting 2 feet from one and it is whisper quiet.
Whoever said that iMacs are quieter must have very different iMacs than I've got.
Whoever said that iMacs are quieter must have very different iMacs than I've got.
Mine only "revs up" when booting. Otherwise the loudest part is the drives. It's practically silent. Maybe your fans are dusty.
My last mac pro had to have several service calls - on one of them the tech replacing the logic board clipped one of the heat sink wires. For the next -2 weeks- my mac pro ran with all fans at 100%. I thought I was going to lose my mind it was so loud.
I eventually (last month) got a new octocore mac pro out of the deal, so I won't complain at this point but MAN is that thing loud when all fans are cranked up (which never happens in "real" use).
I have the early 2008 mac pro and it is the quietest tower I have ever had. My father has a quiet PC built using an Antec P180 case, which is a favorite of those over at www.silentpcreview.com, and I would say my mac pro is quieter. I also have my tower sitting on my desk while his is on the floor.
If you do a search I think the only weakness of the mac pro design is the potential for hard drive vibration noise being transferred to the case if you try and load up the chassis with 3-4 drives. Some people have this problem and some don't. In any case there are work arounds for this issue.
The case is one of the best designed tower cases on the market on a number of fronts:
1. aesthetic appeal
2. BTX style air flow
3. ease of use (removing panel, adding drives, memory)
4. low noise footprint
If you do a search I think the only weakness of the mac pro design is the potential for hard drive vibration noise being transferred to the case if you try and load up the chassis with 3-4 drives. Some people have this problem and some don't. In any case there are work arounds for this issue.
The case is one of the best designed tower cases on the market on a number of fronts:
1. aesthetic appeal
2. BTX style air flow
3. ease of use (removing panel, adding drives, memory)
4. low noise footprint