Completely Silent Media PC 275
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.'"
Bucking the trend. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Silence is Golden, like my component cables (Score:3, Interesting)
Also: (Score:4, Interesting)
My attempts for a silent PC (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:1, Interesting)
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:The sound of silence (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:But who is going to buy one? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Habituation, boiled frogs, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
Our audio environments are so suffused with fans and other hums that our bodies are adapted to these sounds. Without them the soundscape [uoregon.edu] 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 [www.sfu.ca], 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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://avsforum.com/ [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.
Don't see the point (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The sound of silence (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When the power goes out (Score:3, Interesting)
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.