So I have this Mac Pro desktop machine, that I got in April 2008: the 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeon model. When Amazon delivered it into my eager hands and I first powered it up, it was almost totally silent. It was excellent for recording, video-making, anything that required a quiet room. (Or just if you like to keep your sanity relatively intact.)

But as it aged, a fan inside the machine has been getting louder and louder. Starting up from a power down it’s still nice and quiet, but as the machine warms up it gets steadily louder until it begins emitting a constant, annoying mid range buzz combined with a high range whine that gets picked up by any microphone, including the Audio-Technica USB mic I got for audio recording. And it varies in pitch as I scroll or do other things that put load on the CPU. Freaky.

I Googled “mac pro loud fan” and found a few suggestions. I tried opening the machine and blowing out the dust with a can of compressed air, but that didn’t help. I tried opening the machine and pressing a tiny button on the motherboard to reset the SMU. Didn’t help. Reset the PRAM. Blew out some more dust. No joy.

Thankfully, I purchased the Applecare extended service plan to go with the Mac Pro and its monitor. So I set up a “Genius Bar” appointment at one of the local Apple stores, lugged this monster over there, and discovered it was not the CPU fan — it was the fan on the video card making the noise. Apparently this particular version of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is known for it; as soon as he opened the machine, Genius said, “Yep, that’s one of the bad cards.”

But thanks to Applecare, replacing it was free. I usually forego the extended warranties, but this is one time I’m glad I didn’t; it’s come in handy more than once.

All of this is just a tedious techie intro to an open thread, but who knows, someone might find this information useful within the next decade. Google never forgets. (Unless you ask nicely.)

You know, a lot of right wing bloggers seem to think I’ve gone nuts — maybe it was the video card fan noise all this time?

One way I’ll be able to tell: if I suddenly start worshipping Sarah Palin.