I actually run it as a server - so most of the time I don't have to listen to it right next to me - it's just sitting in another room in my house - but I often am traveling with it and will have it sitting right next to my coding laptop and yea the fan runs non-stop - it's not obnoxious so i can pretty easily tune it out - also airpods/noise canceling headphones help!

There’s fan noise, but the acoustic engineers at Apple have done a very good job of making it be pretty much not noticeable to someone who has noise sensitivity (me).

my AC is noiser than my GPU server.

the noise is pretty doable, and so is the heat, I find. I read these messages before I had the machine and expected far worse. The tok/s is for me the dealbreaker as I prefer to have multiple sessions. For nightly runs i do like it a lot, or to be a node in a mesh.