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still having (terrible) fan noise one month on
Authored by: oliverlangan on Dec 05, '05 10:07:32PM

Over a month ago, when the 10.4.3 update was just released, there was a flurry of complaints on many mac-related message boards about increased fan noise. I had the same problem on my iMac 20" at home and my PowerMac G5 at work, and tried all three solutions that I found online:
* change the processor performance setting in the Energy Saver preferences pane
* completely unplug the machine for (up to 10 minutes), plug it back in while holding down the power button, then release and press power again (SMU reset)
* resetting several options in open firmware

None of these worked for me, but my work machine is far enough away (and in a noisy environment) not to have bothered me. My new son was two months old and not sleeping through the night, so I barely used the iMac anyway.

Now, however, he is sleeping through the night and the iMac fan noise has become terrible. When catching up on my TiVO watching via EyeTV, the fan noise gets so loud it sounds like being inside a 747 jet (though admittedly without the low base rumble). I can not hear the audio of the programs, and have to resort to Closed Captioning. The same is true when playing some games, notably World of Warcraft. I can definitely say that these activities were much, much quieter before: and that the fan took longer to activate when it did come on.

In most cases I have noticed, MenuMeters shows the actual processor usage to be quite low: but the applications are graphics intensive. I wonder if perhaps the fans could be keyed to the usage of the graphics chips, not the main CPU.

Has anyone else been plagued by these long-running fan issues? Has anyone with an iMac G5 (20", no-builtin-iSight model) managed to get rid of all traces of these fan issues?

oliver



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still having (terrible) fan noise one month on
Authored by: airsine on Dec 15, '05 03:12:25PM

I'm running a 20' G5 imac and the fans are driving me mad. There doesn't seem to be any link between the amount of data being written/read to the HD or the CPU temp and the RPM of the fans. I hope the next update sorts this out.



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still having (terrible) fan noise one month on
Authored by: oliverlangan on May 17, '06 10:38:15AM

Well, eventually I took my iMac G5 (2gHz, no iSight) to the Genius Bar in SF and told them exactly all the things I had done to eliminate fan noise. The girl working on it said "well, I guess there is no need to diagnostics!" and they took it in and swapped in a new logic board.

That was about 2 months ago: the machine was wonderfully silent at first, but now, alas, the fan noise is coming back. I have tried all the tricks again, but they don't last for long: last night just reading email was enough to kick the fans into high gear! Armed with my knowledge that Apple _knows_ about this problem, and the fact that they fixed it once before, I am headed back to the Genius Bar. Thank goodness I got AppleCare on this unit.



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