Mac Studio 2023 fan noise - It's significantly quieter than the previous gen! Base fan speed lowered from 1300RPM to 1000RPM. Still whines a little

[James_C]

I've completed analysing the Mac Studio M2 (Max base, 64tb), recorded on an RE20 studio mic.

Compared to the first generation:

1) It is significantly quieter - I can barely hear it at all in my quiet office.
2) I've detected no whine.

The last sonically great high performance desktop was the iMac Pro 2017, the M2 now takes it's crown and is even better than it was. Subjectively, the noise when the fans spin up is very pleasant. I'm happy to say I would definitely recommend this one if you've been on the fence.

Thank you for taking the time to do the analysis, very reassuring. I have been looking to replace my 27” iMac for over a year, last year I purchased the studio display but then held off on the Gen 1 studio due to reports of loud fans / coil whine. Hopefully my new Studio Max arrives later today.

 

[SmallDane]

Let's be clear on the above, that is a traditional coil whine that you get under computation that varies in frequency.
The one most associated with the M1 Studio is a stable whine that doesn't vary in frequency (it's around 2.2Khz) which most of the annoyance has been with as it doesn't stop or doesn't appear to be related to the activity of the computer.

Coil whine=variable
M1 studio whine=stable

But I don't think this kind of coil whine has been reported previously on the old Mac Studio. So is there a potential new issue? I definitely did not like that sound!

 

[MuckrakerJG]

But I don't think this kind of coil whine has been reported previously on the old Mac Studio. So is there a potential new issue? I definitely did not like that sound!

For what it’s worth, he clearly says it only happened once in all of his testing and it was after doing two intensive Cinebench tests back to back and then went away and did not come back during other tests. So if you aren’t taxing the GPU to that extent all of the time, you’ll likely be fine.

 

[dogface1956]

Yes, many people have substantial hearing loss in upper frequencies and have no idea because they were reckless, and some does occur naturally with age.

I have protected my hearing at every live show since I was young, it makes a huge difference and I have the audiologist results to prove it.

The high-pitched coil whine sucks for Pro Audio work in a treated studio environment which is my use case for this machine. Fingers crossed they dealt with it because there’s no chance in hell I’m shelling out for that overpriced under-featured Mac Pro.

All or at least most of the previous posts about the whine in the M1 Studio complained that the noise was at about 2.2 kHz which is hardly the upper frequencies and most people who have lost some hearing with age, working in loud environments or going to loud concerts can still hear frequencies above 2.2kHz. Myself I have gone to plenty of very loud concerts (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Yes and many others), worked on Jet Airplanes (on the deck of a carrier and other places) did not do anything unusual to protect my hearing (dumb kid) am now 66 years old and last year had my hearing tested and could hear 100% up to 15 kHz and 30% loss up to 17 kHz after 17 kHz could not hear a thing.

 

[dogface1956]

Read my other comment, above.
It is not insulting. I have a tinnitus from DJaying and have hearing issues when loud noises are around me. Under the desk is wise, the further way it is the better. You managed to control the fan noise to nearly zero...so..you made a wise decision with the mounting. Nevertheless: Put any studio on a table and work with it for 1 Week and tell me there is no whine again.

My studio has no whining noise, I can hear the fans when I push it hard, but there is no whining sound, I have had both my kids listen to it, my room is very quiet, I live in a pretty isolated location so no environmental noise, my Studio is on my desk about 20 inches from my head. I have had the Ultra since the first day it shipped. The whine seems to be at 2.2 kHz and I can hear it clearly in the videos some have posted on Mac Rumors, but my Studio 100% positively, does not make any noise whining noise, just normal fan noise when I am doing some sound editing us RX loaded down with various plug-ins and working on batches of very large files.

So, yes it is insulting when you say that it's there but I can't hear it, just as it would be insulting for me to say that you are hearing things and the maybe the noise you are hearing is caused from the tinnitus you have from DJaying.

 

[novagamer]

All or at least most of the previous posts about the whine in the M1 Studio complained that the noise was at about 2.2 kHz which is hardly the upper frequencies and most people who have lost some hearing with age, working in loud environments or going to loud concerts can still hear frequencies above 2.2kHz. Myself I have gone to plenty of very loud concerts (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Yes and many others), worked on Jet Airplanes (on the deck of a carrier and other places) did not do anything unusual to protect my hearing (dumb kid) am now 66 years old and last year had my hearing tested and could hear 100% up to 15 kHz and 30% loss up to 17 kHz after 17 kHz could not hear a thing.

That's really impressive if they weren't compensating for age with the testing. A lot of times they'll define loss as 25dB in certain ranges but if you had a full spectrum test you won a genetic lottery or something.

I have very mild loss (~5-10dB) in upper frequencies in my left ear just from driving with the windows down occasionally so I take a lot of precautions and limit exposure when I can despite being very involved with music. I take decibel readings when I play or record 50-100w guitar amps to make sure I'm not going to do any harm and stay within the exposure time limits when it's in the 90dB+ range. I've had a couple tests done because I work with audio semi-professionally and needed to know if I had to compensate for anything when working on mastering.

I hope I'm as fortunate at your age, if I'm lucky enough to get there. Glad you're happy with the machine.

 

[James_C]

Received my M2 Max today - I can't hear the fans at all - very happy.

 

[Freida]

Keep us posted about the fan speed etc. please. Wonder if the noise changes or it stays at idle speed as some mentioned.

Received my M2 Max today - I can't hear the fans at all - very happy.

 

[James_C]

For reference I have a 2014 Retina 27" iMac sitting beside me - I can hear the fans on that (not loud but audible), but not the new studio. Not doing any heavy lifting on either machine at the moment, just basic office stuff and web browsing.

 

[Think77]

Received my M2 Max today - I can't hear the fans at all - very happy.

How hard have you pushed the CPU and GPU cores so far? I’m wondering if there’s a certain tipping point at which the whining/coil noise kicks in…

 

[Longplays]

Max Tech failed to throttle the 2023.

 

[Ismelito]

I don't know if this is the "whine" you are all referring to, but with my Mac Studio M1 Max I hear a sound, like a slight rattle, every time I apply an effect to an image, open a video, open a link, scrolling through a page on this same forum... Just routinary things that I don't think push a CPU as powerful as this one to its limits. It's kind of annoying. A quick way to test this is to install the "Black Magic Disk Speed Test" app and run the test. Every time it tries to write and read (especially write) I can hear that noise. Is it the same on your side? It's as if there was an actual hard drive noise (not an SSD)

 

[James_C]

How hard have you pushed the CPU and GPU cores so far? I’m wondering if there’s a certain tipping point at which the whining/coil noise kicks in…

Just in the process of setting the Mac up at the moment, I don't do a ton of video editing it is mainly for photo editing and office stuff. I have got full FCP studio, but have not downloaded it yet.

 

[James_C]

I don't know if this is the "whine" you are all referring to, but with my Mac Studio M1 Max I hear a sound, like a slight rattle, every time I apply an effect to an image, open a video, open a link, scrolling through a page on this same forum... Just routinary things that I don't think push a CPU as powerful as this one to its limits. It's kind of annoying. A quick way to test this is to install the "Black Magic Disk Speed Test" app and run the test. Every time it tries to write and read (especially write) I can hear that noise. Is it the same on your side? It's as if there was an actual hard drive noise (not an SSD)

I have the Mac Studio M2 Max with a 2TB SSD. I have run Black Magic Disk Speed Test a few times don't hear any rattling sound at all, dead quiet.

At the moment it is still downloading a 500GB Photo's Library so take these results with a pinch of salt, but these are the results.

 

[bobcomer]

I can hear that noise. Is it the same on your side?

No, that's not the same as my whine, it was all the time, no matter what the computer was doing. Yours sounds more like coil whine.

 

[Ismelito]

No, that's not the same as my whine, it was all the time, no matter what the computer was doing. Yours sounds more like coil whine.

Yeah... It seems that it's definitely the SSD. It's the same noise as in this video:

 

[ChrisRRR]

I don't know if this is the "whine" you are all referring to, but with my Mac Studio M1 Max I hear a sound, like a slight rattle, every time I apply an effect to an image, open a video, open a link, scrolling through a page on this same forum... Just routinary things that I don't think push a CPU as powerful as this one to its limits. It's kind of annoying. A quick way to test this is to install the "Black Magic Disk Speed Test" app and run the test. Every time it tries to write and read (especially write) I can hear that noise. Is it the same on your side? It's as if there was an actual hard drive noise (not an SSD)

Which disk variant did you choose?

 

[Ismelito]

Which disk variant did you choose?

I have the one with a 1TB SSD (getting around 6000MB/s for writing/reading speeds)

 

[bobcomer]

Yeah... It seems that it's definitely the SSD. It's the same noise as in this video:

Weird, I never heard a SSD make that noise! It's definitely not anywhere close to the whine my studio had.

 

[AdamSeen]

Pushing the machine, I could get it to 1200RPM.

At nearly 100% usage of most things (E-CPU, P-CPU, Neural engine, GPU) - total package power peaked at 76watts on the M2 Max base (no idea what TDP of the M2 Max base is). I saw peak power hitting 120watts for a split second on a few occasions, but then the system crashed or processes failed - so maybe some tweaks on Apples end. I didn't push it to it's absolute max as couldn't run some of the benchmarks I wanted to due to time and GFX bench wasn't working.

When the cores reached around 90c (194 freedom units), the fan started kicking up to a max speed of 1200RPM. The back temperature reached 47.4c (117.32f). Overall, quiet as hell, I couldn't get it to reach the 1300RPM base speed of the original.

This was the Studio they should have designed from the beginning. It's going to be telling to see a teardown and see if there are any physical changes, or it's just a fan curve change.

* Ambient temperate was 22.3c.

 

[Sharky II]

I'd bet my car (I don't own my house unfortunately) that there are only software/fan curve changes. And that they don't come to the M1 Studio.

 

[designerdave72]

I'd bet my car (I don't own my house unfortunately) that there are only software/fan curve changes. And that they don't come to the M1 Studio.

Probably because Apple think that consumers can deal with themselves with 3rd party apps. You can guarantee they read these (and the Apple Community Forums) and do take on board what the consumer is going though. But, at the end of the day, they're only interested in making money so if you buy an M2 because your M1 makes a noise, they're quids (or dollars) in!

 

[AdamSeen]

Ifixit have completed a tear down and found it’s the same internals as the first gen. No obvious cooler changes, it appears the only major change apart from the chips themselves is a fan curve change.

 

[Freida]

Ifixit have completed a tear down and found it’s the same internals as the first gen. No obvious cooler changes, it appears the only major change apart from the chips themselves is a fan curve change.

damn

 

[mr.datsun]

Ifixit have completed a tear down and found it’s the same internals as the first gen. No obvious cooler changes, it appears the only major change apart from the chips themselves is a fan curve change.

Which model are they comparing when they say same internals? Maxs or Ultras? They dont say.