Hi. Is the new asymmetrical fans in the Retina MBP an original design by Apple? I don't see cooling fan companies like Scythe having that design. If so, that's a great innovation to decrease fan noise significantly.
Thank you in advance.
Gbu.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), iMac Late 2009
i just saw that announcement video of the asymmetrical fan - i almost fell off my chair laughing at how the crowd cheered at such a thing... i don't even want a fan, yet all those people in the crowd must have been waiting their whole lives for an asymmetrical fan lol... maybe it will be a 'feature' when the fan is removed like it is a 'feature' that the dvd drive is removed and omg, the ethernet too haha - i'm so hanging out to buy a laptop with an asymmetrical fan and a really slow wireless lan connection (compare to my current)... and I hope the computer is a wedge shape too, because omg, if it weren't a wedge even by a mm slope, it will be totally flat and my marbles won't roll off - that won't be fun.
The industry term for asymmetrical fans is 'modulated blade spacing'.
"i don't even want a fan"
Feel free to remove yours if you like. It's your machine, after all. Maybe it doesn't really need a fan. You think?
I don't see any results about computer fans in the first three pages when I Google "modulated blade spacing" and "computer". Just helicopters. Apparantly the asymmetrical design sounds subjectively worse in the main rotors compared to the standard. Perhaps because you hear the unbalanced rotor wumping around at ten hertz, instead of the blades humming by forty or fifty times per second.
The Mac fan runs more like 2000 to 4000 rpm: 30 to 60 Hz, so maybe a complicated set of harmonics at that "humming" frequency and above would be subjectively less annoying. I would have thought the main noise from a computer fan was the air turbulence at the blades, though.
As to getting by with no fan at all; that was done in the original Mac. The case was tall enough to create a chimney effect and allow convection to cool the insides. I think the old "cube" shape also worked by convection.
You might also try adding radiator fins, working in a tub of Perflubron, or gluing an adobe block to the bottom as thermal mass. Or earplugs. Or playing music really loud.
Asymmetrical Fans Original Design By Apple, Scythe Nor Thermaltake Doesn't Have It
