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kklein · Feb 28, 2008, 04:50 AM

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I finally got my new Mac Pro last weekish and have been setting things up and moving my life--mostly without trouble--off of Windows.

The machine is great; I loaded it up with hard drives and a DVD burner from my PC and everything is working fine. Except...

Good lord this 8800GT is loud.

I actually spent about $500 silencing my PC. I can't stand noise. I cannot. Stand. Noise.

So, anyone here had any thoughts/success/read anything good about tearing apart this 8800GT and putting a quiet or fanless (the latter is probably impossible, since it will probably need to go under the card as well and there isn't any space there) cooling solution on it?

And if I gorf the card, can I get another? I don't mind (well, I do, but it's not THAT bad) making a $350 mistake; a $3000 one is a bit more than I can handle. That is to say, voiding the warranty on the video card doesn't bother me that much if I can get another; voiding the warranty on the Pro does not sound like a lot of fun.

Any thoughts?

And one whinge because I can't let it slide: What the hell is it with Apple and the high end graphics cards? They make silent or quieter versions of them; why chintz out and buy the crummy ones? Hell, offer me a silent solution for $50 more and I'll take it!

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 28, 2008, 10:27 AM

I have the 8800 as well. BUT, my machine is silent. Dead silent.
Maybe it's the hard drive making sounds and not your graphics card???
I say this because that's the only difference between my machine and yours is that you installed your own DVD burner and hard drives from your old PC. My hard driver and burners were installed by Apple and shipped with the computer.

Good luck.

grafphoto · Feb 28, 2008, 11:31 AM

That's interesting, mine is also dead silent, except on rare occasion there is a whhooossh when the MacPro fans come on, but only briefly. Is it actually the card or the system fans?

mr. burns · Feb 28, 2008, 02:30 PM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

I have the 8800 as well. BUT, my machine is silent. Dead silent.
Maybe it's the hard drive making sounds and not your graphics card???
I say this because that's the only difference between my machine and yours is that you installed your own DVD burner and hard drives from your old PC. My hard driver and burners were installed by Apple and shipped with the computer.

Good luck.

if you haven't played any games, you wouldn't hear the videocard fan. it's only during intense 3d rendering that it needed. i have a mac pro with an x1900xt and it's fan is notorious for sounding like a leaf blower, but i only hear it when playing team fortress 2. i never hear it during everyday photo editing tasks.

Laurence · Feb 28, 2008, 03:01 PM

I too have a Mac Pro with the 8800GT and it is completely silent unless the ridiculously loud Pioneer DVR-112D spins up. I have booted into WinXP and ran Crysis for hours on end and there was no fan noise at all. If it is actually the video card making the noise, I would take it back to an Apple store for a replacement.

kklein · Feb 28, 2008, 11:33 PM

...Yeah, um...

I think that most people would describe this computer as "dead silent," but for me, who ran a fanless PC for 3 years... It's like having a refrigerator in the room. It's about that sound and tone. I'm not talking LANgamerkid's helicopter-sounding monstrosity with 5 fans running full-tilt because he overclocked his machine to get some mad frags; I'm saying I can hear it. And I'm not cool with being able to hear it. I often wear noise-canceling headphones to write. I am utterly crazy about it.

And it sounded that way direct from Apple, before any more drives were installed.

And all the drives in question were running in the PC basically silently (of course you can hear them read/write, but not much--Seagates are the quietest).

It doesn't sound like a HDD, which usually have a whine, as opposed to a hum. It sounds like a fan. It's not the rear fan, though, because if it were it would be lower, given its size. Apple is great about putting huge fans on their cases. Huge fans means less rpms to move the same amount of air, which means less noise off of the blade tips and less motor noise and less reverberation into the case. The only small fan in the box is on that 8800, which is why I suspect it's the culprit.

But just to be safe, I'll pop it open again and see if that is where it's coming from.

Oh, and my god yes that DVD drive is loud. Wow.

P · Feb 29, 2008, 08:44 AM

I've never seen an 8800 in a Mac Pro, but in general there are many third party fans with manual speed adjustment that fit 8800s. You might then turn down the fan to the lowest speed it will still run at until you start gaming.

voo · Feb 29, 2008, 12:46 PM

Originally Posted by P

I've never seen an 8800 in a Mac Pro

The Reason for the Delay on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

glideslope · Feb 29, 2008, 05:17 PM

I only have FSX on the XP drive in my 2.8 Octo MP 8800GT. I've never had the fan be loud except for each boot or wake from sleep for a second or so. FSX is very demanding. I run it at 1680X1050 32 bit with most of the sliders to the right with global density at dense.

Does not get loud on the OSX side either while , say for example batching a few hundred images in PS3. I'll let my son install COD4 and run it and see if it will spin up.

kklein · Feb 29, 2008, 08:47 PM

Yeah, it makes a blowing sound when it starts up. Then that turns down to a hum. I think we're all talking about exactly the same thing, except that any sound at all bores into my skull like a dentist's drill. Like I said, I'm crazy about it, but the folks over at Silent PC Review all suffer the same "affliction" (NOTE: I do not think it is an affliction; if anything it's an indication of the fragile state of my concentration), so I know I'm not the only one.

Yeah, P, I am talking about putting on of those on, should it really be the 8800. The problem I'm worried about, though, is that the solution from my favorite silent cooling company, Zalman, seems to only have a model that requires a some fan pins on the mobo, which I'm sure a proprietary board does not have. If I can find one that runs off a regular 4-pin drive power cable, I'll be able to piggy-back off of one of the DVD drives.

I'm going to open it up again today to move the drives around anyway. I'll double check that it's the graphics card. If it's not, I agree that there's probably something wrong.

So, anyone know about warranty issues? If I gorf the card, which I view as extremely unlikely, I don't mind taking my lumps and buying another from Apple, but I don't want some nonsense like them saying "well, you made a change to the graphics card, so this catastrophic motherboard failure isn't covered by warranty; sorry" down the road...

kklein · Mar 1, 2008, 01:06 AM

It is definitely the 8800. I took the extra drives out and started it up, then listened with a mic and headphones. The HDD is nigh silent, the case fans have a low-pitch, almost imperceptible hum. The only thing in the case that makes any noise at all is the card, and it sounds totally healthy, just louder than I'd like.

I just realized there was a Modification forum. I'm moving this over there.