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My old and entirely fanless iMac DV SE runs Tiger perfectly adequately. The only noise is from the new Seagate Barracuda HD, which isn't the noisiest of drives. My G4 (see http://g4noise.com/ - even with 5HDs - is much quieter than my single-drive HP PC which is just unbearably loud.

My G4 consumes only a fraction of the electrical power that a P4 consumes, leading to a very small heat dissipation (and presumably the need for a small fan), so why the noise?


Do any case modders have any ideas?

I own a dual MDD too. The machine is extremely (50 dBA+ @ 1 meter) loud, its driving me crazy. The fact that he made it quieter would be enough for me to attempt a mod (he has not posted actual dBA values for comparison, though.) I have just been researching such a reduced noise mod, and, for anyone interested, the best one Ive found (there are many in there) is at G4Noise.com (yes there is actually a website dedicated to this issue.) In there, someone managed to reduce the 50 dBA to 30 dBA, making simple modifications. The guy gave a lot of thought to the heat dissipation issue and found very clever ways to improve apple's design, such as a simple cardboard mod that makes a huge difference to cool air intake.

You replaced the fan with one that was not powerful enough, and as a result, fried your CPU... why should they replace/fix your machine for free?

Sure, the fan had what sounds like a well documented noise problem...apple were offering an exchange program for the faulty components. Not sure what the deal is now.

You replaced the fan with one that was not powerful enough, and as a result, fried your CPU... why should they replace/fix your machine for free?

Sure, the fan had what sounds like a well documented noise problem...apple were offering an exchange program for the faulty components. Not sure what the deal is now.

Didn't Apple offer new quieter fans for those? I swear I read that you could exchange the fans for an updated quieter one.

Didn't Apple offer new quieter fans for those? I swear I read that you could exchange the fans for an updated quieter one.

Actually, I am seeing a number of folks either 1) migrate to or 2) seriously consider Apple's Xserve for purposes sort of in-between. The Xserve runs UNIX, it is absurdly easy to manage, they are cheap, and give pretty good performance especially when code is optimized for Altivec.

I've been on the lookout for this (and possibly webobjects uptake) and just haven't seen it... where I have seen xserve adoption has been in certain areas where macs would have been the preferred platform (ie, mac clients) but for many reasons they had to go with a higher-end unix or NT server as apple just didn't have much to offer for that market. There was a small market for people who wanted to use Apple servers but they just didn't meet their needs- so Apple saw a big spike in sales for them when they were released. Heck, some of these people use OS9 with webstar... I'll be more impressed if they can actually grow unit shipments quarter after quarter.

I mean... for 99% of the server tasks out there where are you going to see massive improvements due to altivec? You don't see apache getting big gains from using SSE on x86. Much more important to the xserve's large performance increase over past apple offerings was the new DDR bus, and the just as important new architecture with some mondo bridge chips for cutting the processors out of the equation as much as possible via DMA requests. This is because the bandwidth to the processor is very limited with the current machines in general, and in a dual config they have to share it... cutting them out of the process helped a lot.

That's why you hardly saw any improvement with the new DDR machines for things like photoshop over the past towers, as bandwidth but for server related tasks it helps sooo much.

Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.

I'd be interested in knowing just what thermal savings there actually are in using an xserve over a competing x86/sparc 1U server. I've used them, and they are NOT cool running machines... they're very hot, and extremely noisy as a quick google will show.

People always think that the PPC is so much cooler than x86, and in general it is... but we aren't talking about 1/4 of the thermals here. Crack open a new P4 or AMD box and there is some big heatsink stuff going on there... kinda funny. Crack open a G4 quicksilver where Apple has been having to essentially overclock the processor and they're ungodly big also, and run really, really hot with huge fans that have made their customers pretty peeved. Just look at these pictures to get an idea of just how big the heatsinks are in new mac towers... and realize that the fans are very, very loud.

So we know that the current G4's are hot as hell, as are the pentiums and amd processors. Apple uses some monster chipsets as well, and it isn't as though apple uses different disk drives or memory... so where are the big thermal savings with the xserve? Companies make custom enclosures like this and this just to make them run cooler and quieter... I doubt people would spend the money on them if there simply wasn't a problem.

Now if you were talking about something like this... gotcha. But they're a whole different ball of wax.

Don't get me wrong- the xserve is cool, and a lot of the points you make about it are valid... as are things like this (largest xserve cluster i know of). But it isn't a miracle worker and it isn't a cool and quiet server.

Here.

It cranks out a little under 50 dB of irritating noise. The iMacs are nice and quiet; the old Cube was silent, these things are beastly loud!

I feel like something of a fool for my purchase now. I went into the purchase thinking "oh, it's an Apple, they're good about making their boxes quiet". If I had known how loud this thing was going to be, I would probably not have purchased it. Apple is not doing anything significant to address the issue, even though virtually every G4 owner I've talked to is extremely unhappy with the white-noise machine they recieved.

So at this point, all I can do is warn anyone thinking about purchasing one of these boxes; if you are seriously thinking about it, make sure you go and personally hear one of these boxen running before you make a decision and plunk down several thousand dollars. Think very hard about whether you want to put up with the racket.

I would also highly recommend checking out this website, which is devoted to g4 noise issues to understand how other people feel about this issue.

Apple updates Power Macs, releases 20 inch display:

The noise level was one of the biggest complaints many customers had with the previous generation Power Macs. According to Apple, this problem has been fixed and customers will be happy with the results of the work put into correcting this issue.

"We worked really hard and went over the systems to find every possible way to make the system quieter," said Tom Boger, Director, Power Mac Product Marketing. "I'm happy to tell you that we've done that -- when the systems get out in the marketplace, I'm sure our customers are going to be delighted at how quiet these systems are."

"They are significantly quieter -- these will answer the critics," added Joswiak.

I hope so... I don't want my next Mac to end up looking like this...

I have an older PowerMac by my left knee and at ear level it generates 44 dB of soft white noise. The new-style mirror-face PowerMacs also generate about 44 dB of noise. But it's whining, tonal noise. It's a note you can hum. It's a hum that cannot be ignored.

Also, apparently, when the mirror-face PowerMacs' auxiliary fan kicks on, it's described as a "leaf blower." It's a lot louder. (I haven't heard that -- the main fans are bad enough -- and it's possible that the recent firmware upgrade helped keep the leaf-blower fan mostly off.)

The hum is so annoying that there's a website devoted to complaining about it and trying to get rid of it: g4noise.com.

A friend of mine has a music lab with 20 old-style PowerMacs that he'd like to upgrade to newer models. He got one mirror-face PowerMac just to see what it was like. The noise is totally unacceptable for a music lab station -- there's not even any question -- I sat down in front of the keyboard and it took me three seconds to realize there's no way I would use this computer for music.

The best solutions seem to be building a plywood case, lining it with foam, and putting the whole PowerMac inside!

So I hope the new models have quieter fans...

Let me shut off my wind tunnel so that I can hear you.