Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I never really noticed how much noise my PC was making until I finally turned it off!
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
How will I know when I walk into a room that my pc is on if I can't hear fans humming?
With a silent media PC would you at least be able to use closed captioning so you know what is going on?
Unless you can hear that high pitched whine of a black label Delta fan.
-Certified TechnoWeinie
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...you can hear their servers grinding to halt!
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 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.
A not-direct quote FTFS:
It's a product that will appeal to a select bunch of users that value silence above all else. If you happen to be one of them, it will appeal to you."
Yes, if you happen to be one of the people to whom it will appeal, then it will appeal to you.
There is a good reason to look for high quality cooled and silent PC's, quite the same as it is for better looking cases. People who use studio's will be really glad not to bistracted by a noisy computer, and require ultimate background noise. Some small office or home office users want can now use fileservers using very noisy scsi disks arrays and don't need a special room to place the severs in. Especially for high spec workstations (not to mention high spec gaming gear) need rubust cooling. People who spend many many ours behind their machine, like the idea of a silent pc, which is optimally cooled. If the article is tedious to you, it doesn't mean it is tedious to others. There are many types of users, and these kind of articles are not only meant to a niche. To me it is not tedious at all, I wish more of these products were available and I happily see the articles coming.. "Happy computing!"
Just because the computer is fanless doesn't mean it is completely silent. After all, it still has a harddrive right?
--------------
Expectations are the mother of all sorrow
How... portable!
Anyone who's been to a car audio store knows what the amplifiers look like. Their entire case is one big heat sink. Plus, the use more electricity than a PC. Yet they don't need a fan.
I've been waiting for case manufacturers to turn the case into a big heat sink. If the audio folks can do it, why not the computer people?
The amount of articles on silent PCs is getting tedious - does someone on the ed. team have shares in a relevant company or something?
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.
I forgot to mention media computers for use in your living room.. You don't want to hear so much background noise while you are watching a movie or other stuff. A powerfull, small scaled, silent, fully equipped, good looking computer is key for entertainment system in your living room. There is actual quite a market for it, wouldn't you agree? The more of these products hit the market, the cheaper they will become. If the prices become more reasonable for the average user, I can't see why people not want to buy a silent, well cooled, robust system.
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.
Here are some alternative reviews and piccies while the site is slashdoted: dutch site, uk site, toms hw, japan.
ok its a google search, but usefull
My other Sig is very funny.
There's link to shameless plug "review site" but no link to product itself. Not even in the sidebar thing on top.
Here it is.
Or just get a case with a fan and put it in the next room? I mean, if you're going to wire it anyway, why do you need the A/C? :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Yeah, but it's not exactly 'news' or 'stuff that matters' is it? What we have seems nothing more than a blatant promo for a product and a Web site.
/. should be aiming to provide topical, interesting, innovative and informative stuff that might otherwise escape our notice without us trawling through half a ton of other sites. As it is, after a few years of frequenting this site I am finding it less and less 'cutting edge' and more and more driven by people who want to shift tin; if someone has developed some radical new cooling technique using hitherto unused methods, that's fine, but to get an article accepted because you've launched a new case - big deal - go look at the stuff available from people like Asus and AOpen etc. etc..
You hit the nail on the head when you said "There is a good reason to look for [my italics] high quality cooled and silent PC's" - the original article seems nothing more than feed for those who cannot be ar*sed to use Google for specific product needs.
AT&ROFLMAO
Just drop the innards of the computer (minus the hard drive of course) in an aquarium full of oil
Technoli
Yes, I have put about 7 together from off the shelf parts from various sources - my last P4 2.8GHz cost me around £220 - it does have 2 fans but you cannot hear it in a normal living room. It's not rocket science and this case is nothing new.
AT&ROFLMAO
Yeah, but it's not exactly 'news' or 'stuff that matters' is it?
/., this one seems nice
Well, it is a new product and it matters to me (and to GP... anyway I have seen worst posts in
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
link
TIAEAE!
Why do you assume I have never contributed? I have submitted a couple of stories, of which two were accepted. However, given the fact that the time of landing was known beforehand and given the fact that most slashdot readers are interested in the topic I believe it's safe to assume that a submission already was underway.
But even if there was no submission at all, I'd say that the event was important enough to warrant an article entirely by the editors themselves *shudders*.
Frankly I don't think I was whining, I was just uttering criticism and criticism is something no community can thrive without.
It's either unique or it isn't.
Not true. You are unique just like everyone else. According to the logic of being unique or not, that would mean nobody is unique and therefore we are all the same.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Fanless PCs. Hmmm....
Apple II, Mac, Mac 512, Mac +, Mac Cube, and the iMac (G3). None of them had fans.
For a media PC, I'd want a 44 cm or 19" wide pizza box, not a tower.
And it still looks like a PC: way too fussy and with blanked-off plastic panels, instead of a metal front plate like other A/V components
Why would you bother with that? The Hush PC (no affiliation) looks much better for most silent applications, especially HTPC - it's small, (the case in the article looked huge) it looks good and it's silent. Shame it looks like it's hard to upgrade, not to mention massively expensive. And, contrary to TFA's claims, it has been around for a few years now.
Frankly I don't think I was whining, I was just uttering criticism and criticism is something no community can thrive without. I consider it whining because the discovery has nothing to do with the subject and I cannot see the contribution of you point at all.. Why do you assume I have never contributed If you could just find the word "never", than you would finally made your point, wouldn't you? But even if there was no submission at all, I'd say that the event was important enough to warrant an article entirely by the editors themselves *shudders* If you believe you could do a better job in moderating.. then why not become one?
Not really a mirror, but some pics from this case are at anantech. They took them while visting Computex.
Just wanted to mention it since zalman.com and hexus.net are currently down.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
Leaving the "logic" of this alone for a moment (can you really associate the set of all unique things to equate with a member of that set??) what the original said was "pretty unique", which under most strict english parsing would be "A good looking, aestetically pleasing, unique...", which is not what the poster intended. Try "Novel" or "Innovative".
}#q NO CARRIER
If you want a silent Pc then simply do what we did in the computing industry in the 70's and 80's put the computer in a box with the air vented to a fan in another room. recording studio's do this all the time. we use dryer vent to duct the air from and away the box. using a simple booster duct vent fans in the other room.
other advantages are you can use disposable HVAC filters on the intake so the Pc is almost perfectly clean all the time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've been using an iMac DV, and it does just fine capturing DV and playing any kind of video file I throw at it (haven't tried HD yet though). It also hasa built-in DVD player and that nice VGA port on the back that I hook up to my TV through a VGA-S-Video convertor, and the sound goes straight to my stereo. Couple that with an FM remote, OS X, QT and VLC and I have what I consider to be a "Media PC". And no problems with overheating (though my house is air conditioned during the summer).
If I actually want to burn a DVD, I just sit down at my "main" computer and pull the captured video off the iMac (100 Mbps ethernet) and burn.
Really, unless you're encoding/transcoding video, you don't need that much computing horsepower.
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.
Damn those pesky terrorists
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.
Quiet!? Give me a computer that sputters to life when I press the power button. A computer with a deep rumble when the hard drive is being read. Give me noise!
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
Hush is immeasurably more sexy than that piece of junk. Then again what do you expect from this kind of article, clearly it's just advertising disguised as news.
My media PC has been stone silent ever since I switched from oss to alsa.
Either a thing is unique or it isn't. There aren't comparative levels of unique. How much more unlike anything else can one thing which is unlike any other thing be than some other thing which is also unlike any other thing?
The only type of adjectives that apply to the word unique are those indicating either confirmation ("...truly unique...") or negation ("...not unique..."); there is no such thing as fairly unique, very unique, or even most unique.
Copy editing is a lost art in the 21st century.
Wasn't Apple's G4 Cube silent, or nearly silent? Pretty sure it had no CPU fan (many people complained about the heat). That was one of the strong points of the PPC chips IIRC, its relatively cool operating temperature.
rooooar
Anal, I know, but you know that it's Edsger, not Edger, right?
You must be new here...
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
Except for its mostly-quiet hdd and optical, the Mac Mini is basically silent. We run a couple in my office and even when I put my head next to the Mac Minis, the other computers sitting across the room (a Compaq EVO D500 workstation and a Dell PowerEdge 700 server are each louder).
I'm surprised Apple hasn't released a media-edition Mac Mini... I'd pay $300 extra to get one with an integrated TV tuner, AM/FM receiver, some additional A/V inputs/outputs, and TIVO/MythTV-like software.
I seem to recall another article too because this thing is way old:
3 9
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/20/07582
HJ
As Abe Lincoln said: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."
I am not a crackpot.
So you want to impress me with a fanless computer? Hah! My C=64 doesn't even need heat sinks. That's what I call progress!
I used to use an Apple G4 cube and a PowerBook (G3 Pismo) on my desk at work and I loved how quiet they were. I traded them for a G5 last year and the increase in noise is marked. It has a noticeable impact on my ability to concentrate. Some people, like me, are just sensitive to noise. We are the market that this product is aimed at.
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.
This guy is way out there
- use of heat transfer technology to migrate the energy from these components to the outside case / heatsinks
- a shift to a new technology, like totally asynchronous.
- a complete rethink of the "rectangular box" PC design and enclosed circuitry
Heat piping and liquid cooling has been done. U of Manchester has developed an async version of the ARM. Good luck getting anyone to bite on, and invest in, doing things very different.Next problem is what you do with a very hot case. It's got to be placed where it can radiate the heat. I'm not sure, but crammed into a corner under a desk might not be the best place.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
It will be news once they have a silent server. My office is right near the servers, and those lovely Proliant's just don't know how to keep it quiet.
Fanless servers... the untapped not niche market.
http://www.zalman.co.kr/
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Yet another article with a review of yet another PC case. This is marketing, folks, not news.
And this case happens to be butt-ugly -- which would be fine in a hidden, rack-mounted media center, but I sure wouldn't want it in my living room!
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Wouldn't that make it hard to hear the dialog from the movies?
Of course given the quality of most movies these days you may be on to something.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I'm in the market for quiet PCs, and anyone who isn't has a desire to go deaf I guess.
I'd kill for quiet servers, as I sit here next to a room full of Xeons.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Why the hell are these things so expensive, someone please release a cheap one that doesn't cost more than all the other components combined.
i =2434&p=8
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?
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.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
Save yourself a bunch of money and get a cheap VIA EPIA board and pop it in a nice tiny HiFi unit friendly case like a Travla C137 http://www.travla.com/Products/products.html
A 486 can to MP3 comfortably. A fanless 800Mhz C3-Nehemiah can do mpeg2 & 4 comfortably, and with the mpeg2 and 4 hardware acceleration features of the Via CN400 northbridges' built in graphic chip, it can do it with pleanty of spare juice to do background work like streaming digital terrestial video streams from the TV Tuner cards to the hard disk, or playing mame!
That TNN300 thing looks hideous and would be completely out of place in most living rooms.
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.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Both Thermaltake and Silverstone make good fanless PSU's and CPU coolers. I'm not talking water cooling either, just fanless, with huge heat fins and heat pipes. You're going to pay about $100 for each of these items. So then the only thing left making noise is the hard drive... and for that, just switch to a seagate which are probably the quietest.
Not that hard people.
Meh.
I hereby join the angry mob willing to kill, rape, and pillage for silent servers.
I am d3matt
3 : UNUSUAL -a very unique ball-point pen- -we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn't one good mixer in the bunch -- J. D. Salinger-
There are ways, not including convection, to move air without fans. Heck, The Sharper Image advertises theirs every day. And it would even help keep dust out of your PC.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But this is simply not true! They in fact have a lot fans, including those on Slashdot!
According to the article, the PC generates "literally no noise" and you have to put your ear right up next to the case to hear it.
This is apparently the Orwellian definition of "literally", where it is used with the meaning of "not literally".
I'l give you an amen on that, if someone wants to see shuttle info go to cnn, if you want to hear about something more technologically relevant than that 486 that runs the shuttle come here.
Sick of stupidity? http://www.patentlystupid.com
My old and entirely fanless iMac DV SE runs Tiger perfectly adequately. The only noise is from the new Seagate Barracuda HD, which isn't the noisiest of drives. My G4 (see http://g4noise.com/ - even with 5HDs - is much quieter than my single-drive HP PC which is just unbearably loud.
But my system has onboard hardware-assistend MPEG-decoding. It also has built-in TV out, both NTSC and S-Video. So it works perfectly as a standard-definition media PC -- and the CPU never breathes hard with this type of usage. In fact, mine runs exclusively as a Myth TV front end. And it works great!
The motherboard is availble for about $150.
Fanless cases are available for about $180. (I use the former case and can atest to its utter silence. My system boots over the net and has no local drives. So when I mean utter silence, that's exactly what I mean.)
So, if I had my choice between spending £999 vs $400 for a Myth TV-type system, I would go with the latter. Again.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
I've been waiting a looooong time for a PC capable of handling completely silent media. I guess until now we have not had the necessary technology. These are exciting times! Charlie Chaplin would be amazed if he were alive today.
As far as what to do with the hot case. Car audio amplifiers aren't always mounted in the friendliest of environments. I've seen them under seats and I had a truck where they were mounted on the wall behind the front seat.
i have never heard a hard drive that was even near completely silent. both my xbox and my HD cable box / DVR have no moving fans, but i can hear their hard drives across the living room, sometimes even with the TV on.
It matters to me too. Most modern PCs are fast enough for most things, so the important factors are changing. I often fix my laptop at the lowest speed to keep the fans quiet.
When the guy who wrote the article title realizes that there's other things making noise inside the case than fans.
I'm not saying that a fanless case doesn't have interest, I spent a lot of time tuning a HTPC to function quietly without overheating, so I get the point. This case isn't a solution in my opinion because it's far too large to be useful anywhere other than under a desk, where you most likely wouldn't care so much about noise.
i happen to enjoy the sound of my pc. it'd be too strange without it.
the human mind is a computer, and emotions are its virus.
If your worried about the sound of the fan on your PC for multimedia, you obviously dont have a loud enough speaker setup. 500+ Watts all the way
Really, unless you're encoding/transcoding video, you don't need that much computing horsepower.
Unless you want to do HD, that is.
The iMac G3 did have a fan - it was deep inside, between the monitor section and the motherboard bit.
people that value silence above else and still want a *media center pc* are a tough crowd to please
What I find tiresome is the incessant posting about what people find tedious. And the meta-jokes about it. Puh-leeeze!
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
the antec aria cube case. http://www.antec.com/ec/productDetails.php?ProdID= 08130
i recently bought one with a miniatx board an a 3700+ athlon 64. its not completely silent but its quieter than the rest of the ambient noise in my house. you really have to put your head down by the case to hear anything from it. It also very easy to open and gives access to any part of the innards.
872835240
I realized this when my computer died on me one day. I never turn my PC off and that was the first time in months that my PC was off for the night. I couldn't not go to sleep that night. I got used to the noise so much that without it I kept tossing and turning the whole night.
The silence during the night creeped me out so much that I turned on my fan (in the middle of winter), took another blanket and only then was I able to sleep.
While we are drooling over obsolete hardware, how about the C64, Amiga 500, and VIC 20? Heck, I seem to remember a fanless IBM PS/2 back in the day too (no harddrive).
C'mon Slashdotters, how many times must we quiet/silent PC enthusiasts link it before you actually take a look and read what constitutes a silent PC? http://www.silentpcreview.com/
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
My CS department let me borrow a completely silent computer for a semester. It really was a marvel. The cooling system used no fans - only heat sinks. I did a lot of programming on it, and would often shut down my other box and do my programming in complete silence.
Of course, the 8085 processor and only having 256 bytes of RAM kinda sucked...
"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" -Jesus (John 14:6)
Most "silent" coolers rely on case fans moving air through the case. Without that air movement the case temps gradually rise until the processor cooks.
And because of the skin effect, it helps a lot even to have copper cables coated with silver.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Now, the real question is "when will they come out with a 'Mac Mini HD'?"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Isn't that called drowning? Not very comfortable if you ask me.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
I'm a big fan of the Apple ][ series of computers, in fact I own a ][+ and ][e.
Oh, you meant THAT kind of fan.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You don't:
-do any 3d work
-do any video editing
-do any CAD/CAM
-play games
-do any simulation
-have to use Windows in a noise free environment (audio studio, scientific environment)
So of course you're happy with your iMac DV. Good on you to pick the right computer for your needs.
Now bugger off out of a thread meant for those of us who do do this stuff.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I think 3. is one option which is going to come pretty soon now. A mobo+cpu is where the heat is coming from; a case design where the mobo is completely divorced from the rest of the components, propbably with the cpu/north/southbridge touching the case and the case being the heat-spreader is the way forwards.
The problem of course is the fact that differenbt mobo's place the cpu/bridges in different places. Enter CTX (instead of A/BTX)?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Unless you are compiling big stuff. Or playing games. Or editing digital photographs.
I practically never transcode video, but I am still looking at a dual Opteron box to speed my compiles and run simulations. OK, probably not what every user does, but lots of people do play games and edit digital photographs, both of which benefit from faster computers.
I'd be amused to see how Photoshop performs at developing a 1GB card full of Canon RAW files on your iMac DV. It's bad enough on my 1.25GHz iBook G4 with over a gig of RAM (though the HD is a factor). I would definately see a benefit if someone gave me a nice G5 tower (are you listening Steve?).
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
The parent is right, there are other sources of noise in PCs beyond fans and drives. Transformers can make the most annoying buzzing sounds - not just the ones in your PC either. Silence your PC and you may well notice your monitor hums. Turn that off and you might find the wall wart for your speakers hums too.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Sheesh, ruin a perfectly good subject line. :p
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
or just go buy a new Pegasos 2 with the 600Mhz G3 CPU board which has no fan! I have one of these and it is smallish, light, doesn't have fans, doesn't make noise and is not expensive.
Seriously, though, folks...
Computers can be completely silent. Most PDAs are. Not that you'd want to rely on that level of restriction for your intensive (ahem) computing tasks.
Then again, nothing is technically completely silent. Not above a temperature of absolute zero, anyway.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Silent:
I am a biker and I love bikes, I build bikes, I live bikes. But I hate the noise, so I'm trying to build a silent bike.
--or--
HTPC:
I have a bicycle, but I need more than just a bicycle, so I got into the latest area of custom bike building: Building a nice new motorbike, which has been custom modded into a bicycle.
You don't
Actually I do, but not with my home media PC (an iMac).
What does anything in that list have to do with a home media center? You do 3d work, CAD/CAM and simulations on your TV?
Yes, those jobs require more powerful computers -that's what I have other computers for. And I don't worry about them being quite as much as being fast.
Now bugger off out of a thread meant for those of us who do do this stuff.
Gee, I was responding to an article about silent media PCs and in particular to a post about fanless PCs that said, "None of them where using very powerfull configurations or were not so succesfull due to overheating".
Me thinks maybe you're lost?
Unless you are compiling big stuff. Or playing games. Or editing digital photographs.
You're right, but I was thinking more in the line of what's required in a computer for it to be a general purpose DVR and playback device (also handles music). That's where you may want the quite PC that's not going to be drowning out the dialog or quiet musical moments with a big ol' box fan. The other stuff I do on the "big iron" located in another room. I don't even have a burner in the iMac, but its simple enough to pull up Toast and have it burn a DVD using the burner in my G4 system.
yep, they tend to get silent fairly quickly. Sometimes they just don't start up, sometimes they make one final scream after being thrown against the wall, sometimes . . .
hawk
Grumble. It's completely silent PC cooling, not a completely silent PC. There's still a hard drive in there making noise.
Granted, it's really quiet, but it does not deserve the adjective "completely".
Still waiting for large-capacity flash-based drives on the cheap.
So your (bogus) correction should read:
The more I re-read your comment, the more I realize you weren't joking; you were actually seriously trying to correct me. Twit. As one of the sources I quoted in my previous response put it, "Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don't read much."
I'm sorry to be the annoying non-grammar teacher, but
- You forgot to add your subject and linking verb (I am sorry to be...)
- In America, we use punctuation before the quotation, not after it ("very unique." instead of "very unique".)
- The 'here' after '9th grade' is not needed.
If you slaughter"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."