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.'"

Noisy PC

[johnnyb]

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

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?

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!"

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.

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?
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Expectations are the mother of all sorrow

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:The sound of silence

[Linker3000]

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.

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.

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 [denon.com]

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 [cofan-usa.com] and liquid cooling [hi-techreviews.com] has been done. U of Manchester [manchester.ac.uk] has developed an async version of the ARM [manchester.ac.uk]. 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.

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".