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Review of Silent 400w Power Supply
SnowPunk98 writes "OCModShop has done a review on a SilenX 400w 14 dBA PSU "The power supply doesn't boast any flashy designs or cool colors however that is not the purpose of this power supply. Silence is what the main goal of the unit is and there are tons of features to help achieve that.""
Every time a front-page story about the iPod goes up, you get 150 posts about how much the iRiver is a better deal. Every Rio story has just as many posts trashing it in favor of the iPod.
As far as I can tell, a /. story gets you a 2-12 paragraph blurb followed by 300 posts bashing your product, your company, and anybody who buys your stuff. Not a very good way to advertize at all!
(I have, on the other hand, bought stuff I've seen on /. banner ads. My "#include " beer glasses from thinkgeek, for example.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
My power supply easily outclasses my case fans, cpu fan, and hard drive put together. Of course, that's because all of my fans are undervolted Panaflo L1As and my hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda IV mounted with silicone washers. That said, even my power supply is inaudible if there is any significant background noise in the room. Of course, I"m still thinking of replacing the power supply fan with an Evercool. The quest for silence starts to make one a bit obsessive.
I have a friend who just did this to his pc.
He got a noise blocker cooler for his cpu and a silent fan for his case. Both had manual control of the fan speed.
At low to medium speed we were strugling to hear the fans, but as you got to top speed, they'd get loud as hell.
Anyway, the fans at medium speed managed to cool the cpu to acceptable levels, so it was ok.
After that we realized just how loud the graphics card was, so we went back to the store and got the zalman passive heatsink. Boy did that work wonders.
Now you can't almost hear his pc running, even without changing the PSU, which was a major change for an athlon 2000+ setup that sounded like a turbine.
He burned around 80 EUR on this little scheme, which is why I'm puting off doing it myself. I'm saving for a new graphics card.
Decisions, decisions...
This is going so offtopic, but I have never had a chance to discuss it on slashdot, so here goes anyway.
You mentioned the monitor whine, did you know that a large percentage of the populus can not hear that? Second question. Do you, by any chance, have ADD or AD/HD?
Here is why I ask:
All my life I have been able to hear the whine from television sets, and monitors. Even if I am in another room I can "feel/hear" it when someone turns on (or de-gausses) a monitor. I used to think that everyone else heard it too, and when I realized that they didn't, I quickly stopped talking about it. (didn't wanna be labelled a nutcase or anything)
Especially bad were the old "dumb terminal" CRT's that were starting to go bad. If there was one near me, it would drive me almost batty. I could hear it *all* the time. When I worked at a call center in the early 90's, I would walk around at night when I was on the late shift until I found the bad CRT and turn it off. Usually I could "triangulate?" the location by walking around the room once first.
About the same time I was (finally) diagnosed with AD/HD. About 2 years later, when I switched doctors, I was asked about things that distracted me when I was trying to concentrate. I mentioned the monitor/CRT whine, and the doctor was somewhat amused. "I hear that a lot from easily distracted people."
That got me thinking, so I brought it up at an ADHD group meeting a couple months later. Not suprising to me, almost everyone I asked at the meeting said that they could "hear" the TV's and monitors in other rooms, especially when they are first turned on, even if the volume is all the way down.
I told my doctor about it at my next appointment, and she dismissed it as coincidence. She did not seem to even believe that such a sense of "electronic or electromagnetic perception" even existed.
I had her blind test me by going in the waiting room and switching the TV on and off a specific number of times. I was correct on the number each time.
As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. I just let it go, because it seems to be damned hard to convince someone with a Phd that you might know something that they don't.
Personally I think that, if my theory is correct, (That this "perception" of Electromagnetic interference, or maybe it is just a "sound", is so common in people with ADD or AD/HD, That the increasing numbers of devices which generate those sounds could correlate with the increasing numbers of ADD and AD/HD cases) it could really be interesting to say the least.
Needless to say I have neither the expertise nor the resources to study this.
I apologize to the slashdot readers for taking up so much space, and their time, in my ramblings, I just needed to finally get that out of my system and tell someone when the opportunity came up.
And hey, if I get famous, you heard it here first.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
But Apple only stopped making the 15" iMac last year...
And the original Macintosh never had an external power supply either. It used so little power that it was actually energy star compliant - without any sleep function at all.
"There is, AFAIK, no relationship between ADHD or ADD and being able to hear the line noise. Whether or not you ARE able to hear it would solely depend on your hearing."
True, an ADD / ADHD's ears are just as normal as everyone else's.
However, the human brain suppresses redundant noise (e.g. heartbeat) so that our consciousness may focus on the important stuff. This may be directly related to why ADD people have attention problems (I guess, I am not a doctor).