On Feb 1, 2005, at 11:58 PM, Cotty wrote:
I think that depends. Add-on boards come with extra fans, making extra
noise. Most Macs come ready-equipped, so you more or less get what you
hear. IIRC they have a liquid cooling system for the CPU ? Dave Mann will
know more here.
Only the dual 2.5GHz has the liquid cooling system - the others are air cooled (the heatsinks are huge). Part of the reason why the systems run quiet is because they let the CPUs run quite warm. Mine is 51.4 degrees C right now and the machine is basically idle. I don't think I've ever seen it above about 55 though. The CPU only gets fully-loaded for maybe 30 seconds at a time so the chip doesn't get a lot of opportunity to get really hot.
Once IBM gets their Immersion Lithography system into production we'll see another major improvement as this will enable 65nm and smaller, with the bonus of lower defect rates. This might be what finally enables a G5 PowerBook.
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
