Wednesday, November 20, 2002 |
19:18 - Wind Tunnels
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Kris and Chris and I were doing our usual Mac dishing near my cubicle, when Mark, one of the engineers upstairs who had recently bought one of the new so-called "Wind Tunnel" G4 towers, walked by with a 2U rack-mount device balanced on his head, striding off in the direction of a lab somewhere.
"Hey Mark," Kris called after him. "You've got a noisy Mac, right?"
Mark didn't break stride. "I can't hear it next to the Windows 2000 machine on my desk."
The fact is that these machines are not all that loud. Yes, they are in fact louder than their predecessors-- about twice the ambient noise, or 3dB-- but the predecessors were and are extremely quiet. Kris, who has one of the Wind Tunnels at home, says that if the TV is on, he can't even hear the machine.
The moniker primarily comes from the noise the fan makes when the machine is first turned on (or rebooted). The CPUs in this model do suck more power than the previous ones (and they're dual), so the power supply is a beefier multiphase one than what my three-year-old 450 has (Kris speculates that this is all overkill in anticipation of the IBM chips next year). When the machine is powered-on or rebooted, there are several seconds before the temperature sensors kick in, and the fans default to an "atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed" mode that yowls like a cat on a fence. But it quiets down as soon as the temperature sensors come online and everything settles out.
We couldn't find the decibel meter that another co-worker (who isn't in today) usually has; next time we see him, though, we're going to try to get hold of the meter and do some real measurements.
But the upshot is that "Wind Tunnel" is a tongue-in-cheek epithet, not a derisive one.
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