Noise emanating from Core Duo MBP

[kuebby]

A couple days ago my MBP started making an odd noise, pretty much constantly. It comes from the left side, near the back. It sounds like either a fan or the hard drive, in case it is the HD I'll be backing up everything this afternoon.

Unfortunately right now I'm a ways away from an Apple Store (about 45 minutes) and not near any repair centers either (I'm home from college in MD). What should I do? It wouldn't be the worst thing if I had to drive to the Apple store but I'd rather not do it for nothing.

 

[anim8or]

what kind of noise?

 

[kuebby]

It's hard to describe, kind of like a whirring when it's a little quieter, but sometimes it gets louder and I'd say that's more of a whine. And it's not like the fans are going crazy or anything, right now they're at 1000rpm.

 

[killerwhack]

The fan needs to be replaced

Sounds like one of the two fans is worn out and will need to be replaced. There are two fans in the Core duo. The left fan and the right fan.

I had one replaced out of warranty by the Apple Store. It was $125 total including $45 for the fan and $80 for the labor. It took the store 1 day to fix - though they told me it would take 5!

Make an appointment online and bring it in to your nearest store. Make sure it is backed up and change your root password before going in.

 

[kuebby]

Well the noise has continued but I'm not going to get into an Apple store until Monday or Tuesday of next week.

In the meantime I installed SMC and turned both fans up to 6000RPM to see what they sounded like. They sound like fans, nothing to awful; the left one may sound a little worse than the right though but it really doesn't sound that bad, I still have a feeling it may be the HD. Hopefully the Genius Bar will be able to do something for me.

 

[iMan G5]

The HD is in the bottom left right under your left hand rest.

 

[jeeb75]

It could be the backlight inverter for the screen which can make a buzzing sound. To test if it is this, change the brightness to maximum or minimum and the sound should go away if it is the lcd backlight inverter.

 

[tji]

I'm responding to a very old thread here.. just to add my experience and hopefully help others avoid wasting time debugging this.

I had the grinding noise in my 15" Core2Duo MBP (pre-unibody). I had incorrectly diagnosed it as a fan issue, took it apart and cleaned the fans, messed with Fan Control to set fan speeds, etc...

After playing with the fans for too long, and setting them to Max speed, I noticed that the noise never happened when the MBP went to display power savings mode, and started immediately on wake up.

So, I fiddled with the backlight and found that I could effect the noise by varying the backlight, and make it go away by going to 0% or 100% backlight.

If you're having noise issues, try varying your backlight before doing anything drastic.