Completely Silent Media PC

Kez writes "Zalman's first completely fanless PC case, the TNN 500 was an impressive piece of engineering, but it was very bulky. Aiming their new chassis at those looking to build multimedia PCs and who don't want noisy fans to spoil their experience, the TNN 300 is smaller than its predecessor. From the Hexus.net review: 'It's a niche product that will appeal, in no uncertain terms, to a select bunch of users that value silence above all else. If you happen to be one of them, the TNN 300 is a pretty unique product that will appeal to you.'"

Comments

Bucking the trend.

[mrRay720]

Newer mode = smaller number! I can't remember the last product I saw that on.

Still, silent computers really are the way forward. Who wants fans buzzing at you non-stop? The noisiest components in a PC should be the HD and the optical drive.

No... I don't mean use an IBM Deathstar and wait for the click of doom, either.

When the power goes out

[ReformedExCon]

Sometimes, when the lights goes out, you can really hear what it is like to be in total silence. The refrigerator stops running, the air conditioners stop running. The computer fans and drives stop spinning, and suddenly you're thrust into this silence that is eerily uncomfortable.

When the power comes on and all those once-dead appliances roar to life, it is like stepping back to reality.

I personally can't stand to be somewhere without sound. I can appreciate sound kept to a minimum, but there has to be some indication that things are running, in my opinion. So that when things do eventually expire, that it's not until days later when the CPU has melted itself into the motherboard that I find out the cooling system broke just as silently as it ran.

Re:When the power goes out

[superstick58]

True, the outdoors do have a different feel from indoor noisy environments. However, nature is anything but quiet. The sound of an occasional bird(my outdoor excursions have way more than occasional birds), ground underfoot(snow, leaves, and sticks make huge noises), and rustle of the wind(seems like a roar at times) are not subtle stimuli to me. In addition to these things mentioned, there's squirrels and other animals that make a racket, limbs falling and trees cracking, water rustling and roaring, etc.

Of course, this perspective on the noise of nature could be distorted by an increased sensitivity to sounds when placed in a quiet environment. I wonder what results a sound test would produce when comparing a natural setting to a well insulated room with various appliances.

Silence is Golden, like my component cables

[kyouteki]

This is wonderful. I have an HTPC in my living room, but it is enclosed in a cheap MATX case with 3 small case fans, plus the CPU fan. Since I don't like turning it off (thus preventing me from recording TV programs), the sound of the fans is just something I've learned to live with. However, with a case like this, I could enjoy my expensive home theatre setup just that much more.

Also:

[imstanny]

Another selling point is that the dust collection is kept to a minimum, and there's no need to worry about dust getting stuck in the most crucial areas like the fans or heat sinks.

My attempts for a silent PC

[PIPBoy3000]

My first attempt was to build a stylish case with large fans, quiet hard drives, and a massive heat sink for the CPU. It worked fairly well, though the CD drive was incredibly loud in comparison.

My second attempt was far more successful. The CPU is in another room, with a hole in the wall for cables. This is a far better approach as the only noise I hear is the quiet hum of the monitor.

There's one down side, of course. I have to walk through a couple doorways to put in a CD, though that's a fairly rare occurrence these days. If I was really hardcore I'd have a USB CD-ROM drive next to the monitor to solve that problem. Still, it's probably good to get me out of my chair from time to time.

But who is going to buy one?

[Alkonaut]

The only time you need a monster like that for cooling your computer is if you are a gamer. Normal passively cooled chassis don't allow for the ultra-high powered graphics cards of today. The question is perhaps why a gamer (who is probably listening to deafening explosions) would need his computer to be silent?

A media computer however doesn't really need a high-power 3d card. So it doesn't need a £1000 case either. A next-gen console will be less than half the price and probably serve well as a media computer including gaming.

A totally fanless media computer, or a quite noisy gaming computer can be built for a fraction of the price.

Re:But who is going to buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is perhaps why a gamer (who is probably listening to deafening explosions) would need his computer to be silent?

Maybe because this gamer also uses his machine for actual work? Game mode = first hard drive (XP), work mode = second hard drive (FreeBSD).

Seriously, I used to have multiple machines, and then the wife declared this verboten after she noticed a difference in ambient room temperature. When I'm gaming, sure, I want loud thunderous kabooms. When I'm working, I want to hear very soft, faint music in the background and NOTHING ELSE while I try in vain to find that coding error. My BSD box used to sound like it was about to go into a hover. My wife wants zero difference in ambient room temperature.

In addition, after spending substantial amounts of time in data centers I notice that I have a ringing in my ears that won't go away (and have now started using earplugs). I don't need any more white noise.

Re:But who is going to buy one?

[frooddude]

Apparently you don't know what kinds of things people that use home-built Media PCs want to do.

http://avsforum.com/ has all the info you're looking for. And these people are putting the highest-end "gaming" hardware to use doing video transform functions on their source material before putting it out to their projector/TV

Scale, sharpen, color correction, and a whole lot more. Not to mention that once they have all this taken care of, alot of them go on to play... games on their big screen.

Re:The sound of silence

[clausiam]

You'd almost think so... And it's even more annoying given the fact that the Discovery successfully touced down almost an hour ago. You'd think that's stuff that matters but somehow Slashdot is the only online news outlet outside the great firewall of China that missed it.

On the contrary IMHO. What has been getting tedious is that /. has lately become a mirror of major online news sites (CNN etc). If all the other news outlets carried the story of Discovery why on Earth (pun intended) should /. carry it too?

/. is (was?) "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters", not "News for Everyone, Stuff that Just Happened".

Let's keep the tech-related news that don't get mainstream coverage here on /. but let the major outlets handle the news of the moment.

Habituation, boiled frogs, etc.

[gobbo]

Habituation happens when a stimulus is so consistent that it interferes with sensitivity to our environment, so we filter that, for instance, flat-line sound out, it becomes part of the baseline condition, a new version of silence in a way.

Our audio environments are so suffused with fans and other hums that our bodies are adapted to these sounds. Without them the soundscape feels empty and eerie. Think of it as an extension of chronic industrial disease, however. Case studies in the Sahel discovered that 70 year-olds showed no significant hearing loss, due to typically healthy blood and an extremely quiet environment.

Some of that deep discomfort people feel when they're camping away from honking traffic is also due to ideology that's sunk down into the bones over a few industrial generations. Silence, not just quiet but really quiet, is deathlike, an absence of life, an absence of civilization. It's dangerous.

Interesting how I can always hear these "silent" computers. It really is relative.

That new?

[torpedobird]

I have a Cube sitting here from years ago with not a fan in it, and with a barracuda hard drive, the thing is silent.

There were hundreds of computers with one or no fans back in "the day" where megahertz was what really counted, not gigahertz. Hard drives WERE the loudest part.

Now we seem to have left all that behind in the name of going faster. My LCIII can still check mail, and I can still do graphic design on my cube.

I like my lower power bill and quieter room.

Don't see the point

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

when you can get a silent Athlon 64 in a tiny Shuttle XPC SN85G4. I bought one bundled with an Athlon 64 3000+ and it's quietest, fastest desktop I've ever owned. Suse justs hums along silently on this thing. The proprietary Shuttle cooling system is silent and effective. The DVDRW is the loudest thing on this system. Outpost.com is selling the deal I got for $379 Add memory, hard drive, CDROM, and the 64 bit OS of your choice (Suse is flawless) and you're in business.

Re:The sound of silence

[airjrdn]

You aren't comparing apples to apples.

While people typically do turn their standalone DVD players off, they don't typically turn their HTPC "dvd player" off, because it's also doing DVR/PVR duties as well.

Not to mention the fact that they don't typically get turned off anyway, they just have to return from standby mode (if you've opted for that to happen). Which is probably not much slower than powering up your standalone DVD player.

Also, if you've ripped your DVD collection to DivX AVI's (typical for HTPC users), and don't have to mess with DVD's at all when it comes time to watch something, the HTPC is now actually MUCH faster than the standalone DVD player that makes you retieve your DVD, open the player, put it in, close the player, wait for it to spin up, wait for 15 minutes of advertisements, and finally begin watching your movie. By that point, I'm 15 minutes into the movie on my HTPC, don't have to put anything away when the movie is over, and my original DVD is locked safely away in the DVD cabinet.

Quite isn't everything

[infonography]

I just got a ASUS DiGiMatrix, it's not only silent but it fits in with my stereo components. I just got it and haven't worked out all the features but it's been working well as a normal component in my network running headless without an issue. All the software is Windoze so I put XP Pro on it and manage it from my linux box w/ Terminal Services. Take a look.