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Noise - Mac Pro v. G5
- Thread starter amccallum1
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Thanks. Are the earlier, air-cooled G5's more or less noisy than the LCU ones, or about the same?
> Thanks. Are the earlier, air-cooled G5's more or less noisy than the LCU ones, or about the same?
Pretty much the same. The LCU was just another form of cooling that happened to deal with the higher heat dissipation of the later systems.
If you're even remotely considering a G5, I would seriously urge you to get a baseline Mac Pro (or even a refurb MP from the Apple Store) instead. It's a quieter system, cooler, and draws a heck of a lot less power while providing probably twice the performance.
-SC
Pretty much the same. The LCU was just another form of cooling that happened to deal with the higher heat dissipation of the later systems.
If you're even remotely considering a G5, I would seriously urge you to get a baseline Mac Pro (or even a refurb MP from the Apple Store) instead. It's a quieter system, cooler, and draws a heck of a lot less power while providing probably twice the performance.
-SC
Thanks everyone -
As Scottish Captain (and doubtless everyone else) inferred, I was trying to convince myself that I could make do with a used G5 as my next computer, for obvious sticker-price reasons.
Strangely, my wife is urging me to pay up for the new model, while I am imagining all the beer and RAM I could buy with the price difference.
Irony of ironies, I was never wild about the G5, which is why i hung onto my G4 for years, always intending to skip the G5 and go to whatever came next. Now the time has come, I'm having second thoughts....
By the way, and apologies for changing the subject, what's the deal with the $600+ RAID card in the Mac Pro? What does it do that the OS doesn't do? I am sitting here with RAIDed disks on my G4 PowerMac, having used nothing more than Disk Utility to get going. What does the Mac Pro RAID card bring to the party?
As Scottish Captain (and doubtless everyone else) inferred, I was trying to convince myself that I could make do with a used G5 as my next computer, for obvious sticker-price reasons.
Strangely, my wife is urging me to pay up for the new model, while I am imagining all the beer and RAM I could buy with the price difference.
Irony of ironies, I was never wild about the G5, which is why i hung onto my G4 for years, always intending to skip the G5 and go to whatever came next. Now the time has come, I'm having second thoughts....
By the way, and apologies for changing the subject, what's the deal with the $600+ RAID card in the Mac Pro? What does it do that the OS doesn't do? I am sitting here with RAIDed disks on my G4 PowerMac, having used nothing more than Disk Utility to get going. What does the Mac Pro RAID card bring to the party?
The RAID card takes the parity calculations (or what-have-you) off of the CPU and directly onto the card's processor. It also (at least the '08 model) could save the write cache in the event of a power failure, but only if you had the battery... I do not think the '09 has a battery. There are some other things a hardware RAID can do that a software cannot...
I maintain that Mac Pros are silent because Apple thinks it's more important to their customer base than proper cooling! A stock Mac Pro is NOT properly cooled at the SMC default values under typical use and it's almost dangerous under heavy use. So, either they don't know WTH they're doing (which I doubt) or they're using a cooling profile that satisfies users who don't know WTH they're doing (which is much more likely!).
In either case if you intend to actually use your Mac Pro trouble free for the life of it's specifications then you need to add something like smcFanControl and increase the fan speeds. I guess this will probably put the two systems in about the same decibel range as neither system has any noise suppression AT ALL incorporated into their respective designs.
Thank you Dr. Pants and Tesselator.
I think for the time being I will use the OS RAID and see how far it gets me.
About the noise, thank you Tesselator for that input. Evidently it will be almost necessary to use SMC or a similar utility to keep the fan at a sensible speed, which will raise the noise level somewhat.
Cladding and such make such a difference. I recently replaced the main fan in my G4 Sawtooth with a Nexus 'Silent'. It really was very difficult to hear, with the case wide open. Great. Then I shut everything up and got back to work. Half an hour later I realised it had become louder. I gave it a slight nudge and it was quiet again. Nuts, i thought. Later on, I hauled the machine up onto my desk to try and figure out where the noise was coming from. To cut a long story short, it turned out to be the shelf on which the G4 usually sits. You gotta love harmonics.... I'm going to get a scrap of carpet or something and see if that fixes it....
I think for the time being I will use the OS RAID and see how far it gets me.
About the noise, thank you Tesselator for that input. Evidently it will be almost necessary to use SMC or a similar utility to keep the fan at a sensible speed, which will raise the noise level somewhat.
Cladding and such make such a difference. I recently replaced the main fan in my G4 Sawtooth with a Nexus 'Silent'. It really was very difficult to hear, with the case wide open. Great. Then I shut everything up and got back to work. Half an hour later I realised it had become louder. I gave it a slight nudge and it was quiet again. Nuts, i thought. Later on, I hauled the machine up onto my desk to try and figure out where the noise was coming from. To cut a long story short, it turned out to be the shelf on which the G4 usually sits. You gotta love harmonics.... I'm going to get a scrap of carpet or something and see if that fixes it....
The Apple RAID card also allows you to build RAID 5 and 6 arrays, whereas OS X's software RAID limits you to 0/1/10. The other advantage of having a dedicated RAID card is that in the event you need to reinstall the OS, you don't lose your RAID set like you would with a software RAID.