Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Is your Macbook Pro silent?

Do you hear you MBP's fans when they're at their lowest setting?

  • My MBP fans are silent during light use

    Votes: 94 87.0%

  • My MBP fans are audible during light use

    Votes: 14 13.0%
  • Total voters
    108
P

powz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 24, 2007
198
0
For those who own an MBP, is it silent or do you hear the fans during light use (i.e. when the fans are at their lowest)?

Thanks for your input!
 
Mine is definitely not DEAD silent but it's pretty quiet. Fans are usually around 2000 rpm. You can definitely hear it in a quiet room (definitely not in a lecture room though...)
 
Fans are at 2000 RPM and can't hear them at all. Guess if I turned off the TV and made the room totally silent I would hear something but I would HAVE to listen for them.
 
Working on my PowerPoint presentation at 4:00 AM today I could hear the faint hum of the fans in my Macbook Pro. Both were running at 1998rpm and at 4:00 AM anything is audible. This thing runs like a champ.
 
2 month Old stock MBP 2.4/160GB...

I got a 2 month Old stock MBP 2.4/160GB...

Fans are usually 2000 RPM; a bit of HD if lots of files movin' but really pretty darn quiet...:cool:
 
mine is loud. Even with normal use. When it is on a table it makes a vibrating noise. Any thing to do about this?
 
Under light use (fan's running at 2k RPM) it's pretty much inaudible during most of the day, however you can definitely hear a light 'hum' during the dead of night.

I'm not complaining though, it helps me keep my sanity when working on those all-nighters, dead silence kills me ;)
 
Wow, thanks for the great response! Please keep it coming.

I'm surprised by the vast majority of people who said their MBP is dead silent! Is this the case even in a quite room when you're sitting right in front of your MBP? I can definitely hear a low hum/whirr with mine in this situation so I guess mine may be a bit abnormal.
 
powz said:
Wow, thanks for the great response! Please keep it coming.

I'm surprised by the vast majority of people who said their MBP is dead silent! Is this the case even in a quite room when you're sitting right in front of your MBP? I can definitely hear a low hum/whirr with mine in this situation so I guess mine may be a bit abnormal.
Click to expand...

Well in a quiet room I can hear it, but that's expected. You need some air moving through the darned thing :)
 
My fans stick ayt around 2,000RPM too. You hardly notice any sound, so very happy camper.
 
I've got a 2.0 ghz core duo, and it's very, very quiet. I'm painfully obsessive about silence in my computers. I've wasted more time than I care to think about trying to rig up silent desktops that would do everything I wanted them to. The mbp beats (almost) all of them for quietness, and destroys them on functionality. It's quieter than my mac mini, as well. Fans are normally around 1000 rpm. I still notice the quiet whoosh of the fans when in a very quiet room, and wish even that wasn't there, but it's really fine. More irritating is the regular parking of the heads that the 160 gb WD scorpio I dropped in there does, but even that I've come to live with. The only noise that really bothers me out of this machine is the very high pitched hissing noise when both cores are idle and the AC adapter is connected. Most times when that's occurring, I just shut down one core and silence returns, or turn on photobooth if I really need both cores to be active.
 
How do you shut down cores? I didn't know you could do that. Does it save much power / extend the battery life?

Cheers
 
My MBP is not too loud unless i play games on it or do video conversion. I keep my fans running at atleast 3000 RPM though. It might not be dead silent, but atleast i dont have any burns on my thighs :D .
 
Marky_Mark said:
How do you shut down cores? I didn't know you could do that. Does it save much power / extend the battery life?

Cheers
Click to expand...

You download the CHUD tools from apple's site. They're free for anyone to download.

http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/

Basically it just gives you a tool that shows you the load on each of the cores, and allows you to turn one of them off, or back on. It's unsurprising, but still a good reality check, that I almost *never* notice a difference in usage when I've got one core shut down. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have much impact on battery life at all, though I've done no controlled tests. I'm sure it has some impact, but probably nothing to get excited about. I take that as a sign that the power management of the Core series is quite good.
 
when the fans are at 2000 rpms, just occasionally hear the HD or the superdrive (if i'm using it, then it's loud). But when the fans are going at a relatively high rate, it's anything but silent (nor did I expect it to be).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back