Posted on 12/10/2007 7:35:06 AM PST by Momaw Nadon
In this instance the noise from computers is real... and can be very distracting. Fans run the gamut from 27 deciBels up to as high as 50. The 27 DB is extremely quiet and the 50 is extremely noisy.
The Macs are very quiet. I cannot hear my MacBook Pro at all when it is running... and a friend's Mac Mini is even quieter. My G5, with nine fans, is normally quiet (you have to put your ear right up to it to hear it at all) but when you put a lot of stress on the processors, it will rev up all nine fans and it can get pretty loud. The quietest Mac I ever had was my G4 Cube... no fans at all. It was cooled by a chimney effect.
I like quiet computers and appreciate the fact that Apple was the forerunner in this area. My iMac is nice and quiet, especially compared to my wife’s wind-tunnel PC.
And the 9 fans on the G5 were great, especially when coupled with five separate temperature zones. It’s almost sad they didn’t need that design anymore after switching to Intel.
If gold and “oxygen free” wiring was truly so great, the National Electrical Code would’ve demanded such.
Barnum was right....
They can emit noise but that is usually in the 5 to 10 milliseconds before the tops dome up and the thing craps out.
I'm at a loss to explain how a cap could "whine".
One of the Caps on my motherboard whines when I overclock the proccesor.
Re: whining caps.
Back in the days of foil and paper capacitors it was not uncommon to get a whine when the paper was holed and there was arcing through.
Brand new caps in flash cameras and high amperage power supplies used to whine all the time when charging.
Good point, but IIRC in PCs they're used for low-voltage conditioning and noise filtering.
True. Anyway, on the silent PC front, the next time I build one I’m going to put in a 230mm fan. They have great airflow and are about as quiet as an encased hard drive. The only way to get a quieter machine is with one of the new solid state drives.
One thing I’ve found that helps is to look at the noise level when buying a hard drive in the first place. My wife’s PC has a hard drive that you can clearly hear running from across the room, but I’ve never heard the hard drive on my iMac.
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