There are two main types of annoying fan noise. There's the guy pulling for the visitors when you're trying to watch the darn sports ball game
GOOOOOO and the other of course is the roar of your computer's cooling fans.
Nearly every desktop and laptop has at least one fan to keep its temperatures down
and if you've got a poorly optimized cooling solution,
any kind of load on your machine can make it sound like you've got a dead engine taking off on your desk.
Now, obviously, cooling is important. It is inevitable that computer components will generate waste heat.
You can learn more about why up here. But is there a better way to get rid of it than using noisy fans or complicated water cooling setups?
Which, by the way, aren't always silent either.
Well, there are a couple of common types of computers that actually don't use fans at all.
Tablets and smartphones. It's pretty intuitive that it wouldn't be practical to strap a fan or a water cooler to your phone
then carry it around in your pocket. But the fact is that tablets and smartphones are basically just small computers
that can do most of the things commonly done on a desktop or laptop.
So how do they get away with it? The secret sauce here is called reduced instruction set computing or risk.
You see, the CPU at the very heart of your phone or tablet
is built with a very different underlying architecture than your desktop at home.
Traditional CPUs are designed to be do-it-all, general-purpose computing devices
that can accomplish a wide range of different tasks.
I mean, just think of the endless number of programs that your home PC can run
from demanding games to video editing software
to even applications that were written before you were born.
However, your Android or iOS phone or tablet has a CPU that's capable of executing
fewer types of instructions and carrying them out in fewer clock cycles.
So although they are simpler and not as general purpose as a laptop or desktop
and they're mostly only designed to run vetted apps through the App Store and Play Store,
they are much more power efficient. It's like how fundamentally any car will get you from point A to point B.
But your Aston Martin has a large engine and more cylinders and more complexity
and therefore sucks a lot more gas than your average four-banger Honda Civic
that gets you, well, solid fuel economy and that's about it.
And this greater power efficiency, which is important in mobile devices
to extend their battery life, means that phone and tablet CPUs generate a lot less heat
which can be dissipated easily without a separate fan.
For example, some phones and tablets essentially use much of the device's metal chassis
as one big heatsink. You can actually try it out yourself if you rev up something like a 3D game
and play it for a few minutes. But does this mean that you'll always need to use noisy fans for anything
other than thin portable devices? Well, the answer is actually no.
Fans are widely used because they're cheap, reasonably efficient
and they don't require a ton of space inside a computer's chassis.
But fanless PCs do exist.
Typically, they take the form of desktops built with large heatsinks.
You see, without fans, heat can still be dissipated effectively.
It just needs to be spread out over a larger surface area
so that convection can take place naturally.
I mean, that's why CPU coolers have all those little fins on them.
If we just spread them out, the air can kind of move itself.
Just not very quickly. So if you build a heatsink large enough, you can adequately cool critical components
without a fan attached to them. Not only do huge heatsinks exist for CPUs,
but you can also get them for your graphics card and there are even passively cooled power supplies,
albeit typically at lower wattages. So that's an option if you want a truly silent rig
that doesn't make any noise other than maybe some coil wine.
But the big drawback of these solutions is that aside from being more expensive, they're often quite large.
One recently released passive CPU cooler was dubbed The Heart
and it won't even fit in most cases, not to mention that it requires a custom built setup.
There are others that do fit inside a decently sized standard tower,
but they still take up lots of room inside the case and won't cool as well as a heatsink with a fan,
meaning that you might be limited to lower performance components
that output less heat. So while there are obviously tricks to eliminate the need for fans,
they're not going to be going anywhere in higher performance computing
for the foreseeable future. Just, I don't know, try to think of the racket that they're making as soothing white noise.
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