Why is your Mac fan so loud? Your Mac fan may kickstart when you're running intensive tasks or resource-heavy apps that make your Mac overheat. With MacBooks in particular, fan noise can sound as though your Mac wants to take off. By the way, in case of overheating, your Mac usually slows down.
If your MacBook is also prone to running hot, there are seven ways you can keep it cool and quiet.
- Avoid Chrome.
- Keep tabs to a reasonable minimum.
- Slow your multitasking roll.
- No laps, no sun.
- Test your fans.
- Clean your Mac.
- Keep current.
That's a tough question to answer. As tjk indicated, they should idle at about 2000 RPM (they are never significantly below this level and never off) but depending on what you happen to be doing, they can go up to about 6000 RPM under a heavy load.
Option 2: Delete Macs Fan Control in the Launchpad
- Open up Launchpad, and type Macs Fan Control in the search box on the top.
- Click and hold Macs Fan Control icon with your mouse button until it starts to wiggle. Then click the “X” that appears on the left upper corner of Macs Fan Control to perform the uninstall.
The fans in Macs will usually kick in as a precautionary measure when the CPU is under a heavy load, such as with the tasks mentioned above. But, if you're not sure what's triggering the fans, it's best to open the Activity Monitor and see the apps that are hogging all of your CPU resources.
smcFanControl lets the user set the minimum speed of the build-in fans. So you can increase your minimum fan speed to make your Intel Mac run cooler. However in order not to damage your machines smcFanControl doesn't let you set minimum speed to a value below Apple's defaults.
Move the Mac to a hard surface and see if the fans become quieter after a few minutes. If one of your Mac's temperature sensors is flaky or giving erroneous data then the controller chip might make the fans run at full speed even though the Mac's temperature is in the normal range.
One of the most common reasons for your Mac overheating is too many open apps that then overload your RAM. So before you try to reboot your Mac, remove any unnecessary apps that may clog up your memory. MacKeeper will help you do that in a couple of seconds.
More pertinently, for computers such as a MacBook Pro, that's almost too hot. Apple's Support pages say that “you should use your Mac notebook where the ambient temperature is between 50° and 95° F (10° and 35° C)”.
How to Manually Control Mac Fan Speed
- Get Macs Fan Control free from the developer here.
- Launch Macs Fan Control, then click on the “Custom” button to manually adjust the speed of the Mac fans based on either a constant RPM value or a sensor-based temperature value.
- Select “Auto” to return to the default settings.
Here's how to do that:
- Launch the Macs Fan Control and click the Custom button on the left side fan.
- Adjust the speed of the fans and press OK.
- Optionally, you can select Sensor-based value for both your fans and click OK.
Resetting the SMC on a Mac Laptop Without Removable Batteries
- Unplug the power, then shut down your Mac.
- Hold the left Shift+Control+Option keys down, then press and hold the power button down. Keep all four buttons pressed down for ten seconds, then let go.
- Plug the power cable back in, then turn on your Mac.
The first, and by far the most likely, is that its internals aren't hot enough to need them, at least not at a speed you'd notice. On the other hand, if you're really working it hard and they still don't come on, there could be a hardware problem: a sensor or fan gone bad. But the first option is a lot more likely.
2000rpm is pretty much silent and the fans are always running at this speed when the computer is on. When the Mac heats up from more intense processing, it can reach up to 6000rpm which is very audible and sounds somewhat like a jet engine.
