Recent 27" iMacs are NOT silent

[CWallace]

My 2020 with an i7 and a 5700 is fairly quieter than my 2017 with an i7 and a 580 and the fans spin a fair bit lower, as well.

I expect part of that is the 2017 had four years of dust accumulation in the cooling system and the 2020 has four-year younger thermal paste.

 

[mabaker]

I replaced my 2017 iMac (base model quad-core Core i5 with Radeon Pro 570) with a 2020 iMac (mid-tier model 8-core Core i7 with Radeon 5500 XT) and oh my god is this thing loud! What the hell? Before I passed the 2017 on to my wife I was able to compare both iMacs side-by-side at different fan speeds, and the 2020 is much louder at low revs but at the same time significantly quieter at high revs north of ~2,000 rpm.

If it wasn't for the SMC hack I would have returned this iMac right away even before setting it up. For me personally that noise level at 1,200 rpm idle fan speed is absolutely unacceptable. I had to lower revs down to ~850 rpm on the 2020 iMac before I could no longer hear the fan whereas on the 2017 everything below 1,000 rpm was inaudible to me.

No idea what Apple's engineers were thinking and how this jet engine made it past quality control.

Thanks for your account. This is the very reason I opted for the iMac Pro because that low whine of the 2020 would drive me crazy. My God what a failure that model must have been.

 

[mj_]

My God what a failure that model must have been.

After many years of experience, observation, and more (ultimately pointless) arguments on the internet that I am able to remember I am convinced that most users don't give a tiny rat's a$$ about noise, either because their environment is very noisy to begin with or because they are simply not susceptible to the frequencies and sound pressure levels emitted by modern computers.

In orther words: most users won't hear the fan at all.