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
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 jet
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 heat sinks 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 heat sink large enough you
can adequately cool critical components without a fan attached to them not only
do huge heat sinks 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 heat sink 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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