Given that all the next-gen consoles sport some serious hardware how difficult will it be to keep them cool and quiet enough to be able to be used in the living room? Keeping current generation PC's cool and quiet is no easy or cheap task, so how are Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo approaching the solution for their rather small plastic boxes? Are their any innovative technologies that might be perculate back into the mainstream PC market?
How 'Noisy' Will The Next Gen Consoles Be?
- Thread starter Diplo
- Start date
Liquid cooling doesn't determine sound volume. It's the sound of motors and fans, which liquid cooling still has. Liquid cooling is just more efficient at moving lots of heat away from an area, but dissipating it into the environment still needs plenty of airflow. The main advantage of liquid cooling is taking the heat to much large surface area for cooling, avoiding the need for powerful airflows. It all depends on heat-sink sizes and processor temperatures.
Sony have said PS3 at the moment is louder than PS2. Presumably that's older PS2, which was too noisy for my liking.
Sony have said PS3 at the moment is louder than PS2. Presumably that's older PS2, which was too noisy for my liking.
Shifty Geezer said:
You're not seeing the big picture. Sure the noise will be coming from the fan, but if you're using a liquid cooling solution then you can use a less powerful fan since the a liquid solution is more efficient than a nonliquid solution.
Wouldn't it be funny if all cars used VW's air cooled buggy engines?
Shifty Geezer said:
Well that to me sounds a lot like It's quiet.
quest55720
Regular
PC-Engine said:
Isn't the XGPU passively cooled? So the only major thing to cool is the XCPU? If they do a good job on cooling the XCPU the system should be pretty quiet.
quest55720 said:
GPU at 500MHz with 200M+ trannies passively cooled? I'd love to see how they manage that.
quest55720
Regular
london-boy said:
One of the threads talks about the XGPU having less than a 35 watt draw. I read some were else that looked inside the box showed the XGPU passively cooled like some the 9600s.
Lets face it, at the moment we just don't know about noise.
Sony have said that they aim to make it quieter than the PS2 (first revision?). So at least they have an awareness of it as a problem, as they should if they intend the PS3 to be at all useable as a movie player.
From Microsoft I've seen nothing.
Talking about "passive" cooling for the xBox360 is nonsense. With the small enclosure, they will apparently utilize the overall airflow solution to pull air over the circuitry. Just because the heatsink doesn't have a fan bolted onto it, doesn't make the cooling qualify as passive. And we have NO idea whether the the fans will be noisy or not. But both Sony and Microsoft have to take into account that their cooling solution must be sufficient for cramped placement in very hot environments. So we can count on the cooling solution to be quite capable. How much noise that solution will make is directly dependent on how they have attacked the dissipation problem, and how specific their thermal detection and fan control is.
Anything anyone says right now is unfounded speculation.
Anything anyone says after they have shipped (Yes it's noisy! No it isn't!), is purely subjective, and non-transferable to other ears and environments.
Personally though, I'll never buy a noisy console. I don't see why I should endorse such designs as a consumer.
Sony have said that they aim to make it quieter than the PS2 (first revision?). So at least they have an awareness of it as a problem, as they should if they intend the PS3 to be at all useable as a movie player.
From Microsoft I've seen nothing.
Talking about "passive" cooling for the xBox360 is nonsense. With the small enclosure, they will apparently utilize the overall airflow solution to pull air over the circuitry. Just because the heatsink doesn't have a fan bolted onto it, doesn't make the cooling qualify as passive. And we have NO idea whether the the fans will be noisy or not. But both Sony and Microsoft have to take into account that their cooling solution must be sufficient for cramped placement in very hot environments. So we can count on the cooling solution to be quite capable. How much noise that solution will make is directly dependent on how they have attacked the dissipation problem, and how specific their thermal detection and fan control is.
Anything anyone says right now is unfounded speculation.
Anything anyone says after they have shipped (Yes it's noisy! No it isn't!), is purely subjective, and non-transferable to other ears and environments.
Personally though, I'll never buy a noisy console. I don't see why I should endorse such designs as a consumer.
Riddlewire
Regular
Microsoft has stated in interviews that X360 will be quieter than Xbox.
No specific db levels were given, though.
No specific db levels were given, though.
Joe DeFuria
Legend
The only thing officially said about anyone regarding noise came from MS. They said "XB 360 will be quieter than the current X-Box."
That's about as much as we know.
That's about as much as we know.
They did? Good to hear.Joe DeFuria said:
So both companies have stated that they will do better than last generation.
Whether they will actually do so, and if it will only be at idle or if it it will hold true even when in use is anybodys guess. As is relative noise between them at this point.
Which is what I said, you lummox! Using liquid cooling != quieter. If you had a liquid cooler running from CPU to a heat sink with 500 mm^2 surface area copper heatsink, you would need a vastly faster, bigger, louder fan than if without a liquid cooler you run the heat from CPU to a heat sink of 5000 mm^2 surface area.PC-Engine said:
Liquid cooling gives the OPTION of using bigger heatsinks, like the Zalman PC case where the entire case is a heat sink providing large area and less need (no need, even) for a fan. However, stick a small, fast fan onto a liquid cooling solution and it'll be noisy.
So, as I said in the first place,
. Also choice of fans. Although size of fan is determined by heat-sink size, the choice of fan affects how much noise it produces.
A liquid cooling solution in a confined space can be limited to only moving the heat from one small area to another. It's not liquid cooling that's important, but the whole design of the cooling apparatus. thre are some water-cooled solutions that are louder than air only solutions because of noisy pumps, for example.
Which I never disagreed with! I was explaining though, to those that would want to know like Diplo about technologies, that it's dependant on fans and motors, regardless how much liquid or heat-pipe or any other tech you use.
Just to reiterate, the limiting factor is transfer of heat to the final medium, which is always air. Unless you want to run water from the tap to the box, pick up the heat, and guzzle it down the drain, with a constantly renewed instead of recycled fluid
Just to reiterate, the limiting factor is transfer of heat to the final medium, which is always air. Unless you want to run water from the tap to the box, pick up the heat, and guzzle it down the drain, with a constantly renewed instead of recycled fluid
jonnyp said:
DC had a water cooling solution of some sort. Didn't make it very expensive.
