How loud is the Mac Pro under heavy load?

Greetings to all.

I've got a Quad that currently likes to rev up it's
fans when I'm doing 4 core calculations (rendering).
It gets loud enough that it usually drones out
anything not in my immediate area of my desk in my
office. Just slightly quieter then the noise it
throws off when you run Apple Hardware Test (which
has no thermal management, so everything runs at full
blast).

I'm fine with a loud computer, the Quad's still
quieter then some of my PC's. But I would like to
know- everyone is clamering about the Mac Pro's being
quieter then the Quad.

Is this under load, or just idling?

Are the Mac Pro's as loud as the Quad when loaded
down?

-S'Captain

Don't have a Quad, have a G5 dual 2.0 and compared to the G5 I sometimes think the Mac Pro is off! In all seriousness, it is almost dead quiet. You can barely hear the fans and the loudest noise is the disk access. I was pretty paranoid about getting a first REV Mac Pro but I am so glad I did.

I am running in a room at 84F and third party RAM and no noise even under heavy loads.

5 Gigs RAM, four hard drives.

William

Well mine is definitally not as silent as you are reporting. I have 2 GIGs of Ram and 2 hard drives (in bay 2 & 4). I can hear the fan running most of the time, but it is not loud... it is obvious however. Do you not hear your fan at all?

So far, in the 2/3 weeks I've had this machine, I haven't heard the fans rev up once. Right now, as I'm typing this, I have Lightwave rendering a very large file, I'm listening to iTunes and goofing off on the web and it's still quiet as a mouse.

Aside from being slow with Photoshop, I'm still very imperssed with this machine in terms of stability and lack of noise.

What type of moniter do you have plugged into your MacPro and is it on the ground or desk? Do you think these things make a difference? My fan seems to run constantly. It's not that annoying or loud, but it is always running from when I start up.

What type of moniter do you have plugged into your
MacPro and is it on the ground or desk? Do you think
these things make a difference? My fan seems to run
constantly. It's not that annoying or loud, but it is
always running from when I start up.

A Samsung SyncMaster and the computer is on my desktop. I honestly don't know if these things matter. My external Firewire Drive is louder than my machine.
-Vincent

Let's keep in mind that what is "quiet" or even "silent" to one person may actually be fairly "loud" to another person. It's very subjective and also depends upon the placement of your Mac Pro and its surroundings and the amount of additional noise that may be in the same room.

In a quiet home office I can easily hear the fans and drives in my Mac Pro from several feet away. That said, the machine is still what I would call quiet. Further, it seems to stay "quiet" even after several minutes of fairly heavy load (all cores running at 80% or more). I have, however, added two more Western Digital SE16 drives to my unit and that increased the noise slightly. But even before I added the drives there is no way that I would have called my Mac Pro "silent" (unless it is turned off or in sleep mode).

I was compiling linux + playing some wmv video (1280x720) + playing a direct x game through crossover (think Wine for OS X). Load was among 90-95% across all 4 cores. The case fan is still quieter than the hard disk seek noise.