Posted on 12/10/2007 7:35:06 AM PST by Momaw Nadon
JOSH SHENKLE knew that he couldn’t hook up any old PC to the 106-inch Panasonic projection television in his home theater. Most computers come with buzzing fans, whirring disk drives and whining capacitors that compete with the sound system.
“After a while, the noise gets to you during quiet scenes,” he said. “It overwhelms you and takes you away from the movie.”
Computer users who want silent offices and living rooms are starting to ask for quiet computers. Manufacturers are taking notice. Some new computers like the Apple iMac or the Alienware Area-51 7500 are marketed for their silence. A number of other manufacturers are responding by starting to work on quieting their machines.
An aftermarket of parts that people can use to tweak their machines with quieter fans and silent drives is emerging. Some small companies like Zalman are charging more than $5,000 for ultraquiet machines aimed at sound recording studios and home theaters.
Mr. Shenkle, a technical analyst in Minneapolis, ended up building his own PC inside the Antec Sonata 2 (www.antec.com), a computer case engineered to be extraordinarily quiet.
“What’s nice about the Antec 2 is that it has a temperature-sensing power supply with attachments specifically for the fan,” he said. “When the temperature does rise, it will speed up the fans.”
Heat is a product of computation, and every decision a computer makes about a spreadsheet, the color of a Web site’s background or the trajectory of a race car in a game produces a tiny bit of heat. When modern chips make billions of decisions in a second, the heat adds up.
“Most of the noise is related to cooling,” says Mike Chin, the editor of silentpcreview.com. “What you want to do is have the most effective cooling flow with the slowest fans.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.