Interesting G5 fan behavior

[dakota]

I was amazed at how quiet my G5 was for the first five days - barely a whisper.  All of a sudden the fan started running like the exhaust fan on the oven.  I then realized that my central AC had been out for the day and it was very warm in the house.  Once the AC was fixed, the G5 went back to quiet bliss.  I checked it again by turning the temp all the way up, and once it started to get warm, the fan started blasting away.  I haven't read anything about fan behavior due to room temperature, only heat within the computer - interesting!

[giantmike]

Ambient temperature can have a huge effect on internal computer temperature (unless you are using water cooling, but that is a different subject). What kind of temperature fluctuations produced this kind of effect? If it was only a few degrees, I would be surprised, as the fans should increase their spped more gradually than that.

[dakota]

Not a lot of fluctuation, unless you're a human who hates heat!  Usual temp is about 74 -75. I would say that it probably got to about 81-82.

[giantmike]

81-82 is pretty warm. An increase in 8-9 degrees means the air that is trying to cool the components is that much warmer, so I can see why the fans sped up quite a bit.

It will be interesing to see how loud my G5 gets in my dorm room, when I'm playing a resource intensive video game.

[Bruce_F]

My G4 dual 1GHz has the noise reduction Apple fan kit installed. If the ambient room temperature gets above 72 F the fans still get pretty load. Luckily, the temperature usually stays below that.

[Peter]

I guess that makes sense- my eMac make lots of noise when I'm using a photoshop filter- seems to back off when it goes dormant for a while (no screen saver)

Glad the G5 works good for you

Peter