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

Noisy PC

[johnnyb]

I never really noticed how much noise my PC was making until I finally turned it off!

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.

the problem with silent...

[soop]

How will I know when I walk into a room that my pc is on if I can't hear fans humming?

Silent Media PC

[CPUgrind]

With a silent media PC would you at least be able to use closed captioning so you know what is going on?

Re:Silent Media PC

[justforaday]

Mine uses Cage's 4:33 as it's startup sound.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in Florida, I get this all the time, especially when a hurricane is coming through. It just goes to show how noisy our lives have become. Is it any wonder some many people don't get good sleep and are permanently irritable?

I personally like the lack of electric crap buzzing around me, and I'm sure we'd all be somewhat saner if appliances weren't squealing and buzzing around us all of the time.

Re:When the power goes out

[2nd Post!]

That's almost the opposite of me. You don't really notice how noisy your life is until you go out and take a hike in the middle of a forest. No road noise, no freeways/expressways, no fans, no hum of lights or electronics, no buzz of compressors and no creaking of houses and water pipes.

It's like being totally comfortable, like being submerged in warm water with the lights off, and no external stressors. Only the occasional bird, the sound of the ground underfoot, and the rustle of the wind keeps you company.

After an experience like that, I am bugged by the hiss of the hard drive on my otherwise silent laptop, the sound of the freeway in the background, the buzz of fans in the kitchen. It's why I want my next computer to run fanless, and with enough ram to never spin up the harddrive.

Re:When the power goes out

[virtual_mps]

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.

Hmm. In my experience power failures are terribly noisy--all the UPS's kick in and alarms start wailing. Then the generators start to turn over--yikes!

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.

Ahh, but if you listen carefully...

[Zemplar]

...you can hear their servers grinding to halt!

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.

Re:My attempts for a silent PC

[Itchy Rich]

A 10-metre DVI cable and a USB repeater cable are much cheaper than one of these cases

You're missing the hidden cost there. A quiet PC case is much cheaper than buying another room.

Re:My attempts for a silent PC

[oever]

The Dell X1 can do without fan because it has a ULV Pentium and is therefore supposedly very quiet. (I'll know how quiet shortly).

Department of repetitive redundancy department...

[shreevatsa]

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.

Re:The sound of silence

[Device666]

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!"

fanless not silent

[skatephat420]

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

Re:fanless not silent

[Rob the Bold]

After all, it still has a harddrive right?

You could boot from a solid-state drive, and store all your media files on a noisy server somewhere else. Then your only problem is the local optical drive. You could do without the optical drive if you've already got a stand-alone DVD/etc. player, and now you're silent. I haven't tried booting from a flash drive on a windows system, but it should be possible. One of these http://www.acscontrol.com/Pages/Products/CompactFl ash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm will turn your CF card into an IDE drive, or use an all-in-one DiscOnChip http://www.tri-m.com/products/msystems/ffd35ideplu s.html. It doesn't require drivers, so one should be able to install any OS on it.

You could even retrofit your Zalman PC, and poof! now your TiVo is the loudest thing in the living room.

Car, Audio amplifiers

[dogpuppy5]

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?

Re:Car, Audio amplifiers

[edremy]

You mean kind of like this?

It's by the same people. I've got some Zalman fans and heatsinks in my machine and they are really nicely done.

Alternative reviews

[flurdy]

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

what? no link?

[dostick]

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.

Re:what? no link?

[hcdejong]

That's a link to the TNN 500. I can't find the TNN 300 on the Zalman site yet.

Coral Cache

[lucas teh geek]

link

Re:The sound of silence

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Fanless PCs. Hmmm....

Apple II, Mac, Mac 512, Mac +, Mac Cube, and the iMac (G3). None of them had fans.

Weird form factor

[hcdejong]

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

Overrated..

[chewy_2000]

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.

Re:Overrated..

[jtosburn]

Thanks a lot. I get all excited, as they do look awful good, and then realize that they're only sold as complete systems with Windows MCE. And they start at 700 Euro, with most systems being well over 1200. Such disappointment! Oh well.

Anandtech Post

[HansF]

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.

Re:The sound of silence

[shotfeel]

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.

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.

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.

Linux Scores Another First

[paranerd]

My media PC has been stone silent ever since I switched from oss to alsa.

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.

Difficult because heat generators are PCB mounted

[mnemotronic]

For audio equipment, the big heat generators (the output driver FETs or transistors) can be physically removed from the Printed Circuit Board and mounted to the heatsinks. Connections are made with a couple wires. This is not possible with the major heat generators in a personal computer - the processor, bridge, video, and memory must be mounted on the PCB because of the speed of the signals going into and coming out of these components. Long runs mean delays and (more importantly) bad signal quality. Possible solutions are:

1. use of heat transfer technology to migrate the energy from these components to the outside case / heatsinks
2. a shift to a new technology, like totally asynchronous.
3. 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.

Re:But who is going to buy one?

[fishbowl]

I don't want a media PC for consuming media, I want one for producing it. I don't really need high-end video at all, just a 1600x1200 desktop is fine. What I do need is silence. Silence in my case, means, a microphone being used to record piano and flute, which is sensitive to -60dB or so, must not pick up the sound of the PC that's being used to do the recording. The standard suggestion, "put it in another room" is well taken, please don't repeat that. It would be *very* convenient to be able to have this machine on the same rack as the other equipment.

Other users *Do* need video support because, unlke me, they work in the video domain as well as audio.

Anyway, I can deal with what I have today, but the length of USB and VGA cables are a problem, and also, access to the DVD drive is a nuisance.

Completely silent MEDIA PC?

[nightsweat]

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.

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.

Re:The sound of silence

[temcat]

But this is simply not true! They in fact have a lot fans, including those on Slashdot!

Literally

[richmaine]

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".

Re:That's nothing!

[CDarklock]

When my 1989 Dodge Omni went into the shop, they found that the computer was failing and needed to be replaced. Being a true geek, I asked if I could have the old one. They shrugged and handed it over.

After a reasonably frustrating time getting the case open, I uncovered a VIC-20 motherboard fitted with a bunch of massive heat sinks.

No, I am not kidding.