Last year we expanded our web operations and invested in a 3.0GHz 8-core Mac Pro. The machine has performed flawlessly and met all of my expectations up until it was upgraded to Leopard. Apparently Leopard places higher demands on the video card, and as a result the fan on the original ATI X1900 graphics card began making more and more noise until it became intolerable.
It had gotten so bad that the tiniest task given to the video card, such as switching between Spaces, would cause the fan to start whining even louder for 10 or 15 minutes.
We found references to this happening as a result of dust buildup on the poorly designed intake area of the video card fan, but on inspection found ours not so clogged at all. We do open our computers for cleaning every 6 months or so, as we live and work in an area subject to powerful sand storms (Macs Are Great comes to you from the Sonoran Desert).
So in an effort to resolve this issue we ordered the new NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT from Apple. Installing this new card as a breeze, and of course it was not necessary to install any drivers or dismiss 5 annoying dialog boxes about unsigned drivers. It just worked.
Once everything was all done, put back together, and working great I discovered another thread on Apple Support that suggested this noise might be caused by the air intake on the card being clogged by dust. Of course I knew that was not the case on my Mac Pro, as I had tried cleaning it to resolve the noise. Then I saw a photo one guy had taken of the dust clogging up his card, and I realized I had failed to see that spot when cleaning mine.
So just now I took the old card out of it's static bag and examined it more closely.
Ooops! It was so thoroughly clogged with dust that you can't see the heat sink at all. So maybe it is a perfectly good expensive 512MB video card. My bad. Maybe I'll be more thorough in the future while cleaning inside my Mac Pro. I think I paid enough for the new card to learn a lesson from this experience 
Technorati Tags: Mac Pro, fan noise, video card fan noise, ATI X1900, NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT KIT, Apple, dust buildup, cleaning Mac Pro
3 Pings to “Video Card Fan Noise on Apple Mac Pro”
6 Responses to “Video Card Fan Noise on Apple Mac Pro”
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1. Bob Says:
August 10th, 2008 at 1:52 pmThanks for this post! I was having the same problem and it was driving me up the wall, but this solved it! I never would have noticed that layer of dust if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me…
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2. tjhcom Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 1:25 amThanks also — this solved the main issue with my fan noise — high speed fan running much of the time. Now the fan only ‘kicks into second gear’ infrequently and its not gone ‘into overdrive’ since I cleaned out the dust. I would also never had seen the dust if someone hadn’t pointed it out.
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3. stonevibe Says:
January 10th, 2009 at 10:13 pmSame problem here with identical machine. ~Cleaned the ton of dust out the card and now it is almost silent again!
I really should clean my poor old MacPro out more often.
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4. Steve Says:
January 12th, 2009 at 5:55 amI have the same card and experience the identical problem. I’m thinking about installing the same Geforce 8800 card and I would like to know which card performs the best.
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5. Dave Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 9:16 amYup, worked like a charm for me, didn’t ever see how badly clogged the heat sinks in the video card had become, but a quick blast with the vacuum cleaner and blissful silence has returned to my office! BE CAREFUL THOUGH!!! DISCONNECT THE FAN ON THE VID CARD OR USE A PIECE OF THICK CARD TO STOP IT SPINNING BEFORE RUNNING THE VACUUM THROUGH… THE FAN WILL GENERATE ELECTRICITY IF SPUN BY YOUR VACUUM CLEANER AND SEND IT BACK INTO THE VIDEO CARD.. NOT GOOD!
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6. Piet Hein Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 1:44 pmThanks for this! Wish I found this post earlier…
May 4th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
[...] Form: [...]
February 13th, 2009 at 12:03 am
[...] I broke down and decided to do some research. First hit revealed, this entry on Macs Are Great. Sounded plausible and matched what I was hearing so I opened up my machine and [...]
May 27th, 2009 at 4:25 am
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