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Form factor is very far from each others !!
My 13-fan dual GPU workstation does make slightly more noise in full load than idle because the 6 GPU fans kick on. Other than that all the fans are steady.

Nice CPU btw. Largely overkill if just for playing games ...

Yeah of course totally different form factors but my point was that if you have the fans on a lot on an iMac, it is the wrong computer for the tasks.

I use my pc box for cpu and gpu rendering, depending on the app, so the full load is instant ! no gaming for me really ( I prefer consoles for that), but I did put on half life alyx for a VR test, and super smooth.....

Really a totally different experience to an imac (which I truly appreciate the AIO solution) but just didn’t work for my use. The fans were too loud and gpu not strong enough for my requirements.
 
Do you have a sense if they will update the iMP this year? My iMac will be good at least until the end of the year,
Do I know? No.

Does it make sense that they might? Yes. With 8TB onboard storage available for the iMac and the Mac Pro 7.1, I hope for a minor update that includes it as an option.

Onboard storage is much faster for AV rendering and bounce to disk — lots, lots faster. My VIs stream ok from external drives but rebuilding my SampleTank index takes about 12 minutes — a long time when I bill by the hour.

Then there's my biggest reason for wanting as much onboard storage as possible: APFS Snapshots can only work when your projects are on the System drive: APFS Snapshots

Other than that, I will be seeing how much I like nano-glass when I finish setting up my wife's machine (she's put it off a week). So, I'm pretty sure that will be an option in any iMP update.

Lastly, if there's a new GPU that can kick butt on the Vega 64x, it'd be nice to know about it, even if I decline that option. The Vega 64 really does handle my needs quite well.

So yes, I'd like to see an iMac Pro refresh this fall. Since all the things I would want are already being offered by Apple in other machines, there's no reason they can't offer one. Will they? Hell, I don't know. It's Apple.
 
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Thanks a lot.
Anything about the Mac side temps, when idle or light use?

They do pump a lot of heat out the back, but that never bothered me.
Light to medium work, the iMac is a great computer.

If I was getting one now I would just max the spec as much as I could afford, simply because you won’t have the opportunity to do it again.
 
So I have a pretty quiet office at home and I have good hearing and I value silence when I'm trying to focus on something. The office can get down to 29 or 30 dB at night.

For the past ~8 years I've had a Mac Mini which I put on the outside edge of my desk, on the floor. If it wasn't under load, I literally could not near it. I did a test once where I had a friend turn it either on or off when I wasn't in the room, then I'd go into the room and guess if it was on or not. It really was just guessing and I was only right about 50% of the time.

The Mini was getting long in the tooth though and I'd been thinking about a 27" iMac for the past 2-3 years, but didn't pull the trigger because I thought the noise from having the fan right in front of me would be annoying.

So I did a bunch of research and there are about a million posts on various forums about how the iMac is virtually silent if it's not under load, with a lot of people saying they can't hear it at all, that it's literally silent, etc. etc. etc. Finally I found a YouTube video of a guy reviewing his iMac and showing that it didn't move his SPL meter app when he turned it on. (The app only showed integers, BTW...)

So I got up the courage to finally get an iMac (with an SSD of course), after years of on-and-off handwringing, and it is NOT SILENT AT ALL. It is very quiet. According to my SPL meter app, it raises the volume at my listening position from 29 dB to 30 dB. By any standard, that is very quiet. If anything else in your vicinity is making any noise, that thing is probably louder than an iMac. Many settings will have ambient noises that drown out the sound of an iMac, like the HVAC system in many offices, etc.

But, it is not silent. And moreover, the character of the noise isn't super great. If you put your ear close to the fan vents, the noise it makes is a not-unpleasant whoosh. But that sound interacts with various surfaces, such that at a normal seating position, it doesn't sound nearly as nice. I suspect that the... aesthetic?... decision to point the fan vents at the iMac's stand doesn't help. I imagine the stand acts as sort of a partial horn.

Anyway, I just wanted to get on the record in case there are other people out there like me who value silent computing and want to know just how silent an iMac REALLY is. Because again, there are a lot of people claiming that it's silent. And I can see why they might think that. But different strokes for different folks, and in my opinion, if you value truly quiet/silent computing, you should really think two (or three) times before getting an iMac...

ANC Headphones and Spotify will make your life way cooler and then you will really enjoy this iMac
 
Hi, i can attest that i have a constant fan noise on my imac 2020 in a silent room at minimum fan speed. i had a 2019 before and wouldn't hear a thing
 
not yet been there yet. i'm waiting for report first to be sure it is not isolated and how Apple is handling it. still have my warranty ^^
 
My 2019 27 inch imac, with an ssd added to where the sata HD portion of the fusion drive was ... is completely silent. Even when editing 4k.
 
My 2019 27 inch imac, with an ssd added to where the sata HD portion of the fusion drive was ... is completely silent. Even when editing 4k.
No it's not. It's quiet. So quiet in fact that you personally can't hear it. So, to rephrase that statement: your 2019 27" iMac is completely silent to you. Other people more sensitive to noise, such as @motrek or myself, will most certainly disagree. It's been proven time and again that iMacs are not and under no circumstances completely silent. Incredibly quiet and at the very verge of inaudibility? Yes, absolutely. Completely silent? No, absolutely not.

Absolute and unequivocal statements like this throw many people off resulting in quite a few disappointed users whose expectations of allegedly completely silent iMacs have not been met.
 
You are joking, right? Spinning hard drive is NEVER silent. How can you even say that? FD is the worst possible thing that Apple ever gave us. No thank you

And no, its not silent regardless of what you say. The spinning mechanism etc. inside a FD is making tons of noise! Not silent at all!

I have the 2TB FD 2019 iMac and it's so quiet it makes me think I'm sitting in a vacumn. Perhaps you should have gone with the FD drive, a truly great choice for the average user. 😁
 
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No it's not. It's quiet. So quiet in fact that you personally can't hear it. So, to rephrase that statement: your 2019 27" iMac is completely silent to you. Other people more sensitive to noise, such as @motrek or myself, will most certainly disagree. It's been proven time and again that iMacs are not and under no circumstances completely silent. Incredibly quiet and at the very verge of inaudibility? Yes, absolutely. Completely silent? No, absolutely not.

Absolute and unequivocal statements like this throw many people off resulting in quite a few disappointed users whose expectations of allegedly completely silent iMacs have not been met.

yikes a little dramatic aren’t we?
 
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I think it boils down to the pleasant to the ear quality of the whirr sound and thus the build quality of the fans built into the new iMac 2020. Both are not looking good, I gather from everybody here.
 
yikes a little dramatic aren’t we?
No, not at all, because statements like this have led me to purchase devices in the past that turned out to be more akin to blowdryers than silent computing devices, and that I ended up having to either return them or sell them used at a loss subsequently. More often than not when you dig deeper the statement "the XYZ is silent" should really read "I can't hear my XYZ because I live next to a busy highway, my neighbor is running his jackhammer all day long just for fun, and I love to blast music at full volume through my set of 18 high-end BOSE speakers". Susceptibility to noise is highly subjective, and each individual is, well, different. For example, my wife can't "hear" her laptop's fan at all. She can be working on that thing all day long without even as much as noticing that it'd been running at full speed for hours for one reason or another (mostly because Acer's fan control is utter garbage, but that's a different story). In return, whenever she turns that thing on I have to close the door to my office located at the far end of the house because it drives me bonkers.

Whenever there's mechanical friction there is noise. Period. It may not be obvious to most people, and in fact the iMac is the quietest computer available for purchase at this very moment, but it is nevertheless not silent ;)
 
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No it's not. It's quiet. So quiet in fact that you personally can't hear it. So, to rephrase that statement: your 2019 27" iMac is completely silent to you. Other people more sensitive to noise, such as @motrek or myself, will most certainly disagree. It's been proven time and again that iMacs are not and under no circumstances completely silent. Incredibly quiet and at the very verge of inaudibility? Yes, absolutely. Completely silent? No, absolutely not.

Absolute and unequivocal statements like this throw many people off resulting in quite a few disappointed users whose expectations of allegedly completely silent iMacs have not been met.

uh, ok. but the sound of the fridge two rooms away, makes more sound, thus creating the 'illusion' that my Mac is completely silent, since whatever sound it's making can't be heard above the very minimal aibient sounds around.
 
I received my i7 5700 (non-XT) iMac this week. Right from the start I noticed the fan humming and it's clearly audible even from 3-4m away (in a completely silent room). It's a sort-of pleasant whirr and doesn't distract me from the actual work. YMMV depending on the fan you happen to have in the machine.
 
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I have really sensitive ears for fan and disk noise - I can hear DVR fans go on across the room. When the 2020 iMacs came out, I couldn't believe they didn't just use the iMac Pro fan system with these hot chips so I agonized between the iMac and a iMac Pro. I decided I wanted the better gpu so went for a BTO i9/5700/1T/64GB iMac, planning to return it if it was loud. I can't hear the fan *AT ALL* at idle or playing SC2. It ramps up on huge Eclipse java builds, but nothing awful.

No way any reasonable person could sit with *this* iMac and be bothered by noise; the only thing that makes sense is that some fans are great and some are bad.

YMMV
 
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My new i7 5700 made more fan noise while copying large amounts off data between two external drives than it has at any other times. I have heard the gentle fan level several times but with no pattern. Today I ran disk speed utilities for almost hour (internal and external simultaneously) and never heard a peep from my fans. I hear them more than my old '13 i7 quad core but not much. Heat is the reason I did not max my machine out... I hope I chose the sweet spot for longevity. I am old this may be my last Mac.
 
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I have really sensitive ears for fan and disk noise - I can hear DVR fans go on across the room. When the 2020 iMacs came out, I couldn't believe they didn't just use the iMac Pro fan system with these hot chips so I agonized between the iMac and a iMac Pro. I decided I wanted the better gpu so went for a BTO i9/5700/1T/64GB iMac, planning to return it if it was loud. I can't hear the fan *AT ALL* at idle or playing SC2. It ramps up on huge Eclipse java builds, but nothing awful.

No way any reasonable person could sit with *this* iMac and be bothered by noise; the only thing that makes sense is that some fans are great and some are bad. ...

I think it all depends on your situation. I do a lot of work at night, in my home office, which doesn't have a central HVAC system. There's minimal noise from the nearby road at night and my neighbors are pretty quiet. So the only thing that makes any noise is my iMac (when its fan is at the default minimum speed of 1200 RPM). If there's nothing else around you making noise, then the iMac is pretty easy to hear. And once you hear it, it's pretty easy to fixate on that noise and be annoyed by it.

I will freely admit that if anything else is making any noise (an appliance, a ventilation system, road noise, children, etc. etc.) then I would probably be hard-pressed to hear the iMac and might describe it as silent, to me, at that moment.

You may think this is overly picky, but considering that my old Mac Mini was inaudible to me in the same setting, and my current 2015 MacBook Pro is literally silent (the fans stop when the computer is idle-ish), then I don't think it's too much to expect the iMac to be quieter.
 
I think it all depends on your situation.

I am in a room with no road noise and no central air. If I put my ear right next to the iMac vents I can hear the air moved by the fan as it flows past obstructions, but not the fan itself. Mine also claims 1200 RPM. I cannot hear anything at idle in normal use at normal distances from the vents. I _can_ hear my (8 feet away) DVR fans come on and spin slowly when the DVR does garbage collection or compaction or whatever it's doing late at night.

I do not think you are being overly picky -- perhaps a bit unrealistic to *expect* a high performance desktop system to be as silent as an old Mac mini or a five year old laptop.

I do disagree with your premise that it depends on the situation. I'm proposing a different one: it depends on the luck of the draw if they install a loud fan, a practically silent one, or one somewhere in the middle.

My 2017 MBP is also silent at idle, but sadly a blow dryer under load.
 
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