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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

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GOOOOOO and the other of course is the roar of your computer's cooling fans.

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Nearly every desktop and laptop has at least one fan to keep its temperatures down

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and if you've got a poorly optimized cooling solution,

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any kind of load on your machine can make it sound like you've got a dead engine taking off on your desk.

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Now, obviously, cooling is important. It is inevitable that computer components will generate waste heat.

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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?

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Which, by the way, aren't always silent either.

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Well, there are a couple of common types of computers that actually don't use fans at all.

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Tablets and smartphones. It's pretty intuitive that it wouldn't be practical to strap a fan or a water cooler to your phone

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then carry it around in your pocket. But the fact is that tablets and smartphones are basically just small computers

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that can do most of the things commonly done on a desktop or laptop.

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So how do they get away with it? The secret sauce here is called reduced instruction set computing or risk.

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You see, the CPU at the very heart of your phone or tablet

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is built with a very different underlying architecture than your desktop at home.

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Traditional CPUs are designed to be do-it-all, general-purpose computing devices

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that can accomplish a wide range of different tasks.

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I mean, just think of the endless number of programs that your home PC can run

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from demanding games to video editing software

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to even applications that were written before you were born.

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However, your Android or iOS phone or tablet has a CPU that's capable of executing

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fewer types of instructions and carrying them out in fewer clock cycles.

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So although they are simpler and not as general purpose as a laptop or desktop

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and they're mostly only designed to run vetted apps through the App Store and Play Store,

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they are much more power efficient. It's like how fundamentally any car will get you from point A to point B.

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But your Aston Martin has a large engine and more cylinders and more complexity

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and therefore sucks a lot more gas than your average four-banger Honda Civic

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that gets you, well, solid fuel economy and that's about it.

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And this greater power efficiency, which is important in mobile devices

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to extend their battery life, means that phone and tablet CPUs generate a lot less heat

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which can be dissipated easily without a separate fan.

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For example, some phones and tablets essentially use much of the device's metal chassis

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as one big heatsink. You can actually try it out yourself if you rev up something like a 3D game

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and play it for a few minutes. But does this mean that you'll always need to use noisy fans for anything

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other than thin portable devices? Well, the answer is actually no.

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Fans are widely used because they're cheap, reasonably efficient

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and they don't require a ton of space inside a computer's chassis.

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But fanless PCs do exist.

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Typically, they take the form of desktops built with large heatsinks.

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You see, without fans, heat can still be dissipated effectively.

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It just needs to be spread out over a larger surface area

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so that convection can take place naturally.

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I mean, that's why CPU coolers have all those little fins on them.

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If we just spread them out, the air can kind of move itself.

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Just not very quickly. So if you build a heatsink large enough, you can adequately cool critical components

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without a fan attached to them. Not only do huge heatsinks exist for CPUs,

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but you can also get them for your graphics card and there are even passively cooled power supplies,

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albeit typically at lower wattages. So that's an option if you want a truly silent rig

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that doesn't make any noise other than maybe some coil wine.

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But the big drawback of these solutions is that aside from being more expensive, they're often quite large.

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One recently released passive CPU cooler was dubbed The Heart

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and it won't even fit in most cases, not to mention that it requires a custom built setup.

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There are others that do fit inside a decently sized standard tower,

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but they still take up lots of room inside the case and won't cool as well as a heatsink with a fan,

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meaning that you might be limited to lower performance components

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that output less heat. So while there are obviously tricks to eliminate the need for fans,

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they're not going to be going anywhere in higher performance computing

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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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So thanks for watching guys, like or dislike, check out our other videos,

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and don't forget to subscribe. I mean, I can't tell you what to do.

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I'll ask nicely. Please don't forget to subscribe.