WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.600 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 00:00:06.600 --> 00:00:13.320 GOOOOOO and the other of course is the roar of your computer's cooling fans. 00:00:13.320 --> 00:00:19.080 Nearly every desktop and laptop has at least one fan to keep its temperatures down 00:00:19.080 --> 00:00:22.280 and if you've got a poorly optimized cooling solution, 00:00:22.280 --> 00:00:28.000 any kind of load on your machine can make it sound like you've got a dead engine taking off on your desk. 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:34.760 Now, obviously, cooling is important. It is inevitable that computer components will generate waste heat. 00:00:34.760 --> 00:00:43.240 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? 00:00:43.240 --> 00:00:46.360 Which, by the way, aren't always silent either. 00:00:46.360 --> 00:00:50.600 Well, there are a couple of common types of computers that actually don't use fans at all. 00:00:50.600 --> 00:00:58.400 Tablets and smartphones. It's pretty intuitive that it wouldn't be practical to strap a fan or a water cooler to your phone 00:00:58.400 --> 00:01:05.720 then carry it around in your pocket. But the fact is that tablets and smartphones are basically just small computers 00:01:05.720 --> 00:01:09.480 that can do most of the things commonly done on a desktop or laptop. 00:01:09.480 --> 00:01:16.080 So how do they get away with it? The secret sauce here is called reduced instruction set computing or risk. 00:01:16.080 --> 00:01:19.760 You see, the CPU at the very heart of your phone or tablet 00:01:19.760 --> 00:01:24.400 is built with a very different underlying architecture than your desktop at home. 00:01:24.400 --> 00:01:29.680 Traditional CPUs are designed to be do-it-all, general-purpose computing devices 00:01:29.680 --> 00:01:33.720 that can accomplish a wide range of different tasks. 00:01:33.720 --> 00:01:38.600 I mean, just think of the endless number of programs that your home PC can run 00:01:38.600 --> 00:01:41.760 from demanding games to video editing software 00:01:41.760 --> 00:01:45.080 to even applications that were written before you were born. 00:01:45.080 --> 00:01:51.000 However, your Android or iOS phone or tablet has a CPU that's capable of executing 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:56.080 fewer types of instructions and carrying them out in fewer clock cycles. 00:01:56.080 --> 00:02:01.480 So although they are simpler and not as general purpose as a laptop or desktop 00:02:01.480 --> 00:02:05.640 and they're mostly only designed to run vetted apps through the App Store and Play Store, 00:02:05.640 --> 00:02:12.760 they are much more power efficient. It's like how fundamentally any car will get you from point A to point B. 00:02:12.760 --> 00:02:17.520 But your Aston Martin has a large engine and more cylinders and more complexity 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:21.440 and therefore sucks a lot more gas than your average four-banger Honda Civic 00:02:21.440 --> 00:02:25.040 that gets you, well, solid fuel economy and that's about it. 00:02:25.040 --> 00:02:28.880 And this greater power efficiency, which is important in mobile devices 00:02:28.880 --> 00:02:35.160 to extend their battery life, means that phone and tablet CPUs generate a lot less heat 00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:38.280 which can be dissipated easily without a separate fan. 00:02:38.280 --> 00:02:42.720 For example, some phones and tablets essentially use much of the device's metal chassis 00:02:42.800 --> 00:02:47.520 as one big heatsink. You can actually try it out yourself if you rev up something like a 3D game 00:02:47.520 --> 00:02:53.360 and play it for a few minutes. But does this mean that you'll always need to use noisy fans for anything 00:02:53.360 --> 00:02:57.440 other than thin portable devices? Well, the answer is actually no. 00:02:57.440 --> 00:03:01.000 Fans are widely used because they're cheap, reasonably efficient 00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:04.960 and they don't require a ton of space inside a computer's chassis. 00:03:04.960 --> 00:03:08.200 But fanless PCs do exist. 00:03:08.240 --> 00:03:12.800 Typically, they take the form of desktops built with large heatsinks. 00:03:12.800 --> 00:03:17.360 You see, without fans, heat can still be dissipated effectively. 00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:20.920 It just needs to be spread out over a larger surface area 00:03:20.920 --> 00:03:24.000 so that convection can take place naturally. 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:27.680 I mean, that's why CPU coolers have all those little fins on them. 00:03:27.680 --> 00:03:30.840 If we just spread them out, the air can kind of move itself. 00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:36.920 Just not very quickly. So if you build a heatsink large enough, you can adequately cool critical components 00:03:36.960 --> 00:03:42.040 without a fan attached to them. Not only do huge heatsinks exist for CPUs, 00:03:42.040 --> 00:03:47.280 but you can also get them for your graphics card and there are even passively cooled power supplies, 00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:52.920 albeit typically at lower wattages. So that's an option if you want a truly silent rig 00:03:52.920 --> 00:03:56.320 that doesn't make any noise other than maybe some coil wine. 00:03:56.320 --> 00:04:02.760 But the big drawback of these solutions is that aside from being more expensive, they're often quite large. 00:04:02.760 --> 00:04:06.800 One recently released passive CPU cooler was dubbed The Heart 00:04:06.840 --> 00:04:11.840 and it won't even fit in most cases, not to mention that it requires a custom built setup. 00:04:11.840 --> 00:04:15.480 There are others that do fit inside a decently sized standard tower, 00:04:15.480 --> 00:04:21.720 but they still take up lots of room inside the case and won't cool as well as a heatsink with a fan, 00:04:21.720 --> 00:04:24.800 meaning that you might be limited to lower performance components 00:04:24.800 --> 00:04:30.160 that output less heat. So while there are obviously tricks to eliminate the need for fans, 00:04:30.160 --> 00:04:33.720 they're not going to be going anywhere in higher performance computing 00:04:33.720 --> 00:04:40.240 for the foreseeable future. Just, I don't know, try to think of the racket that they're making as soothing white noise. 00:04:40.880 --> 00:04:44.680 So thanks for watching guys, like or dislike, check out our other videos, 00:04:44.680 --> 00:04:48.840 and don't forget to subscribe. I mean, I can't tell you what to do. 00:04:48.840 --> 00:04:51.640 I'll ask nicely. Please don't forget to subscribe.