New Macbook Air fans quieter or not?

M

mykidisgollum

macrumors newbie
Greetings all. I'm trying hard to be content with my 2010 Macbook Air 13 Ultimate - one thing I hate is that I use Parallels frequently and the fans tend to get going pretty much right away, killing battery life and making a louder racket than anybody else's computer in my office.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has a 2012 model with more powerful and more efficient (maybe) processors. Do you find the fans kicking on less? Are they still "wake the dead" loud?

Love the form factor - but I make my computer work hard!

let me know your thoughts.
 
They are louder than the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, but quieter than the 2010 and 2011 from what I can tell. Parallels can still sometimes make it work up a sweat, but the Ivy Bridge processor can handle a lot more than the Core 2 Duo.
 
The 2012 MBA has the new asymmetric fan design, as in the new rMBP (though that has two), which is meant to be perceived as quieter, though I don't have an old MBA to compare. My 2012 MBA is much quieter than my early-2008 MBP, though, even though the latter has been retrofitted with an SSD (though that did make it quieter than when it had a "traditional" HDD)
 
I had a Early 2011 13" i7 MBP /8GB /128GBSSD, and the fans used to come on with Paralells frequently, whilst running Safari, Excel, Word etc.

With the 2012 MBA i5 /8GB /128GBSSD, the fans stay around 2000rpm using Paralells, and the same other applications.

So I think it is definitely quieter.
 
I have a 2012 11" and can't hardly hear the fans... I even cranked them up using iStat and can barely hear them...

WAAYYYY quieter than my 2010 MBP 15"
 
When I play games the fans get loud enough that my family asks about the noise. On the other hand, my old HP notebook sounded like a plane about to leave the runway ALL THE TIME, and the 2012 Air is not nearly that bad.
 
it gets pretty noisy still. Im encoding right now and the fan speed is about 6500 and is loud as fook. 11" ultimate
 
I only noticed the fan going so far once when I was running a game on setting I would never use. Unless you constantly run intensive applications, you'll pretty much never hear it.
 
rye1205 said:
I only noticed the fan going so far once when I was running a game on setting I would never use. Unless you constantly run intensive applications, you'll pretty much never hear it.
Click to expand...

yeah, unless you are doing something intensive, you will not hear it at all. typically the fans run under 2000 rpms
 
oxfordguy said:
The 2012 MBA has the new asymmetric fan design, as in the new rMBP (though that has two), which is meant to be perceived as quieter, though I don't have an old MBA to compare. My 2012 MBA is much quieter than my early-2008 MBP, though, even though the latter has been retrofitted with an SSD (though that did make it quieter than when it had a "traditional" HDD)
Click to expand...

Really? Can you link an article about this because I didn't know they did that
 
I can't tell if the 2012 model is quieter than the previous MBA but it is MUCH quieter than the fans in my 2008 unibody MBP.
 
mattopotamus said:
it gets pretty noisy still. Im encoding right now and the fan speed is about 6500 and is loud as fook. 11" ultimate
Click to expand...

Encoding is literally one of the most intensive things you can do with a computer, other than gaming. So of course the fan is going to go nuts.

In my very limited Apple store experience, I tried to get the fans running on both the 13" MBA and 15" rMBP. I could not get the MBA fan to turn on. I looped a 1080p clip for a few minutes while exporting TIFFs from Aperture and it barely started to heat up, let alone rev up. I got the rMBP fan to turn on doing a similar task, although it was still quiet.
 
oxfordguy said:
The 2012 MBA has the new asymmetric fan design, as in the new rMBP (though that has two), which is meant to be perceived as quieter, though I don't have an old MBA to compare. My 2012 MBA is much quieter than my early-2008 MBP, though, even though the latter has been retrofitted with an SSD (though that did make it quieter than when it had a "traditional" HDD)
Click to expand...

^ This
 
fan runs once when I load it with testing play some games on it. if not i thought mba dont have fans
 
I think some people were getting to it, but I'm not sure if it was every outright said.

Does anyone have experience comparing the current 13" MBA vs. 15" rMBP? In similar tasks, does one kick on fans faster than the other? Is one louder than the other consistently? Does one heat faster than the other with similar tasks?

I'm curious to see how the new 13" rMBP will come out in benchmarking in terms of this discussion, too.
 
I can't compare with an older model MBA, but my 2012 MBA fans are quieter than the ones I had on my 2011 13" MBP. The MBP fans sounded like jet engines when they revved up, but the ones in my MBA actually sound like fans.
 
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What is the 2012 Air fan nose like with skype?

I have a 15 inch 2009 MBP and when i use skype the fans get so loud the person i'm calling can hardly hear me over my fan noise!
 
ive had my 2012 air for several months and i havent heard the fans since i got it. I Usually watch movies surf the web email ect. nothing to intense.
 
Acorn said:
ive had my 2012 air for several months and i havent heard the fans since i got it. I Usually watch movies surf the web email ect. nothing to intense.
Click to expand...

The fans *do* come on if you push the machine, e.g. 3D games, but even then are not that noisy
 
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