Quiet 360s?

[swaaye]

Is there such a thing? I have a friend's launch 360 and OMG it is so loud I can't hear game audio at night when I have to be quiet in my apt. It's nuts how loud that DVDROM is. What were they thinking making a console that must have a DVDROM spinning at 12x full-time? Uhg.

I've read that the newer ones have some BenQ drive that is quieter... anyone care to comment?

 

[-tkf-]

Is there such a thing? I have a friend's launch 360 and OMG it is so loud I can't hear game audio at night when I have to be quiet in my apt. It's nuts how loud that DVDROM is. What were they thinking making a console that must have a DVDROM spinning at 12x full-time? Uhg.

I've read that the newer ones have some BenQ drive that is quieter... anyone care to comment?

The DVD drive is one thing. A friend of mine bought one for Mass Effect, he also has a PS3. He was, to put it mildly, surprised by the noise the machine makes. His PS3 folds 24/7 and he doesn´t consider that noiseless at all, however after he heard the 360 he understand why someone considers the PS3 noiseless. Another thing, he like how he could charge the Controllers in a "low power mode" put it was still making more noise than his PS3.

I wish i could charge my PS3 controllers in low power mode.

 

[AlNom]

The BenQ's are the "quietest" of the drives used in the 360s, but by no means is the thing absolutely near quiet. It's just a problem of being a 12x DVD ROM.

 

[Strange]

Charge your controllers using a computer, a USB power cable (with AC adapter) or charge it when you are folding.

2x vs 12x just makes different levels of noise. Probably no way around it unless you put some serious padding around the whold drive.

 

[inefficient]

I wish I could charge my PS3 controllers in low power mode.

I thought it does now since the 2.0 FW. Today I noticed my ipod plugged in via USB cable was showing charging even with the PS3 powered off and the lamp red.

Also anyone notice that since FW 2.0 even when the PS3 is in powered off state (red lamp) the fan is still running in at a very very low speed. You can just barely hear if if you put your head close to it. Like it is actually in a standby mode or something.

 

[joker454]

I don't think there are any quiet 360's. I just got a second 360, the one that comes with Forza/Marvel Alliance as the pack in games. It's supposed to be quieter, but to me it's as noisy as ever.

 

[swaaye]

Well I guess they really wanted to make that DVD-ROM act as a sort of hard disk instead of actually installing games to a hard disk, like on PCs. Having it blasting away at 12X constantly lets them pretty much use it as such, I imagine.

It's funny actually; this is what CD-ROMs were hyped to be back when they arrived in the early '90s. Instead they rapidly turned into archival storage to install to the hard disk. Consoles are actually using optical drives as people imagined way back then. Heh.

I've noticed that if I put this 360 vertical, it sometimes will lose its grip on that retardedly fast spinning disk and make an awful grind sound. Nice stuff. It's the same kind of thing you'll get if you take a running drive and rotate it. Nasty rotational forces going on there. But the 360 is stationary so I can only assume the drive is crap lol. I keep the console horizontal because of that.

 

[SonComet]

Well I guess they really wanted to make that DVD-ROM act as a sort of hard disk instead of actually installing games to a hard disk, like on PCs. Having it blasting away at 12X constantly lets them pretty much use it as such, I imagine.

It's funny actually; this is what CD-ROMs were hyped to be back when they arrived in the early '90s. Instead they rapidly turned into archival storage to install to the hard disk. Consoles are actually using optical drives as people imagined way back then. Heh.

I've noticed that if I put this 360 vertical, it sometimes will lose its grip on that retardedly fast spinning disk and make an awful grind sound. Nice stuff. It's the same kind of thing you'll get if you take a running drive and rotate it. Nasty rotational forces going on there. But the 360 is stationary so I can only assume the drive is crap lol. I keep the console horizontal because of that.

My 360, a zephyr model with the BenQ drive does that grinding noise from time to time too. Only mine is and has always been horizontal. It also makes a ridiculous high-pitched noise that kills my ears, but it usually goes away after a few minutes. I just wish it would red ring so I could go exchange it for a new one.

 

[pipo]

Aren't 12x drives a bit old by now?

Is it that hard to make a quiet one these days? Would it be a lot more expensive?

Any educated guesses?

When I'm gaming I don't care about it, but it does make a $#!+load of noise compared to my PS3...

 

[Strange]

It all comes down to the spin rate.
12x spins at 6 times the speed of a 2x drive, therefore carrying with it...

if we use the simple Kinetic energy =1/2 mv^2, we see a 144:4 ratio, or a 36 fold difference of kinetic energy in the disk when totally spun up.
AND this is at Blu ray's fastest. Note that Blu ray disks spin at constant angular velocity, which means that the outer layers require a much slower spin rate than the inner layers (and the outer layers carry much more info, so much more time is spent there)

Unless you can find a way to lessen the Kinetic energy, the sound doesn't go away.

Of course, there's also always the option of placing the 360 in a vacuum to take away the noise, but I wouldn't think that would be very nice in the cooling department.
So no, it's not an easy task at all.

Real viable options include
reducing the motor noise (which I expect them to be very good at already);
increasing sound insulation;
spinning the laser head in the other direction to decrease it to 6x from the disk + 6x from the laser head (which I havn't seen anyone try to do);
or spinning the whole console in the other direction (again, 6x+6x).

The first two are truely doable and I think are done by the manufacturing guys as they are obvious answers to the problem.
The third one is a design fiasco if you ask my opinion.
The last one makes for a nice firework show.
Go figure

 

[archangelmorph]

My 360 is as quiet as a mouse..








That's because it's not working..

 

[ArturNOW]

My 360 is as quiet as a mouse..








That's because it's not working..

Quiet as a dead mouse

 

[infinity4]

Cheap drives is one reason. They cause scratches, lens get busted frequently, and they are bloody loud.

Pioneer ones are a lot quieter than 360 ones - IMO.

 

[Red Herring]

Problem with that is Pioneer use a riplock which keeps the speed down to anywhere from 4x-8x when you insert a DVD-ROM, remove that lock and at 12x it might be a little quieter but probably not by much same as the BenQ I'd wager.

BenQ/Philips made a few attempts to tackle the sound problem at high speeds, the 16xx generation had some counters to it but that said they were still noisy at 12-16x.

It's just my own impression but I get the feeling the HD in the xbox 360 gets under utilized I was playing Overlord and the Samsung drive in mine was going full blast a lot of the time, I know there must be some sort of caching going on but it never seems to be that effective to the point were it can spin the DVD drive at a lower speed.

 

[Silent]

I must say that it influence me on buying multiplatform games. If the difference are minimal I now go for the PS3 version.

After all the stories I bought the 360 version of AC and I was blown away how loud the unit is. The last couple of weeks I've played exclusively on the PS3 and when going back the difference was just staggering.

What I never understood how nobody at Microsoft have noticed it when designing this system. What the hell where they thinking ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What I never understood how nobody at Microsoft have noticed it when designing this system. What the hell where they thinking ?

They were thinking people wouldn't care when buying the box. They were thinking gamers in forums would be shouting 'Sony forced a useless HD media format on me at $200 more than I cared to spend, instead of using a cheap DVD drive that would have been faster anyway, and no-one's even going to use the extra capacity of BRD - it was a stupid decision' and not 'Sony's choice to go with a blue laser drive has meant they can keep noise levels down which I really appreciate.'

Quality considerations aren't the strongest buying considerations. The primary purchasing decision is 'does it have the games I want? Can I afford it?' If you get it home and it's noisy/cheap/falls to bits/has issues (speaking generally and not specific to XB360) that may affect you enjoyment of the system, but isn't on the whole going to have you trade it back and get the other system. CE goods are sold on specs and looks, and not ease-of-use or general sundry quality.

 

[Arwin]

They were ragging on it pretty hard on the 1up show, together with the lack of WiFi, pointing out that it is now, together with the PS2, basically the only device that doesn't come out with WiFi out of the box, including the PSP and DS.

Anyway though Silent, you're basically showing that you do get used to it, because it bugged you much more after you had been playing the PS3 for three weeks. So in that sense, Shifty is probably right. For me it has been rougher though, because I got the PS3 when it came out in Europe and the 360 much later, and I've always been sensitive about sound. The sound of the PS2 basically never stopped bothering me, though that was generally less of an issue while gaming then while watching DVDs obviously. But, as they pointed out during the 1up show, low sound production is probably one of the currently most underrated qualities of BluRay as a gaming medium.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Low sound isn't a big selling point for PCs either, but a quiet PC is sooooo much nicer to work with that I place the value of low noise well above performance. A mate bought into an MPC, £800 with dual core yadayada, fanless PSU, GPU, quiet this, that and t'other, and it's still quite a noisy little box that it puts me off changing my system. I spent a lot of time rigging my Athlon 2500 up with huge heatsink, fanless GPU cooler, quiet PSU, fanless chipset cooling, and it's been delightfully quiet for ages to the point that if I switch it on while my ears are attuned for a louder noise, I can't hear it fire up and have to feel if the PSU fan is working! I couldn't go back to a noisy PC and that's one of the primary reasons for me not upgrading - my PC does everything I need at an acceptable rate. I choose a 2x DVD drive over anything fast because the speed isn't worth the jarring racket. How many people buy a drive based on the biggest X factor though? 16x is bigger than 12x right, so it must be better!

It would be nice if, seeing as companies are happy to produce multiple console SKUs these days, when there is a rather cheap low-end solution, that they'd offer a premium version that's got the quality some people would be happy to pay a premium for. I guess in XB360's case there's no way to get a 12x DVD drive down to something pleasant though.

 

[Acert93]

I thought there were some 360s with pretty quiet drives?

 

[Arwin]

First, 1up yours, is not what I would call a definitive source on anything, it boggles the mind how they can "report" on an industry which they seem to have no clue how it operates, they prove this week-in and week-out. Second, my Wii, is damn near silent...what does that say about DVD as a gaming medium

That the Wii doesn't require anywhere near the datarates, and hence drive speed, that the 360 requires? The Wii has a max read speed of 6x, which is half that of 360, and it may well not even use that most of the time. And 6x isn't half of 12x in terms of sound production and cooling requirements, see Strange's post above.

There are certainly different drives in the 360 some of which are less noisy and some more, but they're all still noisy at 12x compared to the other consoles. You could get a more quiet one, but that I think would require more expensive cooling and insulation in the 360, which I don't think we'll be seeing for a while just yet - they don't even have wifi or the PSU internally yet.

Also, the 360 I have is also more noisy already even without the DVD drive spinning. I also think it was a big mistake to have a cooler that doesn't use fixed rotation speeds, but constantly adjusts to what speed is needed. That way the fan stands out a lot more - constant sounds are much easier to ignore than sounds that vary in pitch or (to a lesser extent) in volume.

I hadn't used the DVD drive until after about 2 weeks, so I was quite shocked when it kicked in for the first time at full speed for a game. I'm sure the 360 will get quieter as time progresses, but it will be hard while competition on price is still so fierce.

Wasn't it the 360 with the BenQ drive that was quietest so far? I'm not sure, haven't kept up.