The Mav has a big fan, around the size of a PC motherboard chip mounted fan. The sound takes some getting used to, but if you dont hear it kick on after around 2 minutes of idling, you know you have a problem if ambient temp is above 70 degrees outside.
The Mav front grill looks like a radiator which is actually the front of the fan shroud, so the fan is sitting right there behind the gimbal, thus the sound. It is a little bit noisy but it's cooling 2 internal boards, so I dont mind a little noise. I have yet to see one of the Mav fans fail even after a crash where the gimbal has been ripped off or destroyed, so the fan assembly is built as solid as a rock and out of harms way, which is very good news. I have seen dozens of crashed Mavs and the fan survived every single time.
The phantom main boards didnt have a fan, but never had a cooling problem for the main board possibly thanks to good venting. Phantoms did have a tiny fan on the gimbal board which usually did a poor job of cooling and also had a high failure rate, and as a result, many Phantom gimbal main boards fried while performing firmware upgrades. The Mav gimbal board does not have a fan, so I guess (hope) this one fan that is being used to cool the FC ESC and core boards will provide enough cooling for the gimbal. The gimbal main board sits on top of the fan, so its not in the air stream. Im keeping my fingers crossed that the gimbal board wont get too hot in there.
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