Sony Z: fan noise

Okay, I just picked this baby up on Saturday and I'm about to return it as it has to be flawed.

2.8Ghz with the bluray drive. I've upgraded it from Vista64 to Win7 RTM.

Even at "silent mode" the fan is louder than my 17" MacBook Pro or my 15" Thinkpad W500.

That seems...wrong. It's blowing hot air out even when the machine is just sitting there doing absolutly nothing. It's sitting next to me on my desk next to the W500 (which is dead silent running discrete graphics). It's in STAMINA mode, running in SILENT, and still loud.

?

This will be a fun return as I am going to fight the 15% as the sales guy told me it was a quiet machine.

 

I'm not sure about others.

The 2 Vaio Z notebooks (sold VGN-Z610Y/B & currently owned VGN-Z690CTO) that I've owned have fans that run "loudly!" To my ears, they're definitely louder than my 15" MBP & even my Vaio SZ notebooks.

Is that normal? Unfortunately, I don't have the answer to that question & I apologize for that. I'm sure the experts here will tell you that my experiences are all BS but they'll at least be able to better answer your question.

Good luck.

 

My Z also runs louder than my previous laptop. It does run most silently on STAMINA with the SILENT power profile in use (of course).
But it will easily pump out hot air on SPEED, in my case, rendering CAD images, and encoding videos etc etc; needless to say, the fan gets loud then.

My previous lappie, a Samsung R45 (Celeron 1.6Ghz with ATI GPU) barely made a sound, literally. I hear from some people that the Sony TZ was silent, but I found that rather loud compared to my old Samsung...

To actually check whether your model is flawed, your only option (without returning your Z that is) is to go to a QUIET store and try listening to a Z on display. That is my only suggestion.

The chances are though, if you do send in your Z for a replacement, that will also be rather loud.....

You must understand this; the mobo on the Z is actually smaller than the one found on the TZ - a remarkable engineering feat. But the price to that was crap heat management (which is why you see P9xxx and T9xxx CPUs only at full clock speed for only a few seconds and then down-clock themselves). But you will agree; the fan does do an excellent job blowing out hot air from the insides - the Z is always cool no matter how hard you run it, even if it is down-clocked

Hope this helps...

 

The Z is louder than my TZ and SZ. Even with the setting on stamina and silent mode, there are periods that the Z is silent when the fan is not spinning but the fan does spin up occasionally, and it is quite noticeable, so the Z is not really "silent". But the Z is always cool to touch, with only the area around the left side being slightly warm to touch, where as with the TZ and SZ the whole bottom heat up.