"[RSX] ... we're still waiting" - Anon games exec, BusinessWeek article

[expletive]

Isn't the main culprit for X360's noise levels the DVD drive, when it spins up? The Blu-ray drive in PS3 will be spinning a lot slower - and thus should be a fair bit quieter, at least you'd think. All else being equal, if the drives become the deciding factor for noise level, PS3 may end up being quieter.

I can hear the DVD drive but even if it were absolutely silent, the cooling fans would still be the main culprit.

 

[expletive]

I just speculate hear but Cell atleast *should* consume both less power(according to the documentation), plus the bigger diesize should make it more friendly in the way that heat will be spread and then cooled over a larger area. The RSX i have no idea about of course but you could make guesstimates aswell.

In the end what will matter is good engineering on the cooling system and fanspeeds depending on the load IMO. Also has the design and finish of the PS3 been adjusted with these things in mind, well of course it has but how does it work.

Just compare with PCs and you can have one computer that is much hotter and demands more fans but thanks to brilliant engineering it is as quiet as it could get. Likewise another PC with the same parts but different fans and cooling solutions sounds like the Dustbuster.

Speculation of power consumption aside, i would guess that MS had some pretty smart people working on cooling the 360. You also have to figure with the 360s role in their strategy that keeping it 'polite' in the family room was pretty high on their list. That said, if this is the closest they came to a quiet box without sacrificing clockspeed i have to believe there wasnt much rom to do it better by anyone.

 

[one]

Not always. Two small vents at high speed makes more noise than one big a slower speeds.

Perhaps you meant not vents, but fans? (IIRC Microsoft wanted 1 big fan but ended up with 2 smaller fans)

 

[NaMo4184]

Speculation of power consumption aside, i would guess that MS had some pretty smart people working on cooling the 360. You also have to figure with the 360s role in their strategy that keeping it 'polite' in the family room was pretty high on their list. That said, if this is the closest they came to a quiet box without sacrificing clockspeed i have to believe there wasnt much rom to do it better by anyone.

Thats a logical assessment but, can't one also argue that there is a compromise between how silent the 360 can be and how much the cooling system cost. The cost can be monetary or size.

So you could probably make the 360 quieter but it would also make the 360 more expensive.

 

[overclocked]

Speculation of power consumption aside, i would guess that MS had some pretty smart people working on cooling the 360. You also have to figure with the 360s role in their strategy that keeping it 'polite' in the family room was pretty high on their list. That said, if this is the closest they came to a quiet box without sacrificing clockspeed i have to believe there wasnt much rom to do it better by anyone.

Well of course i think they have smart people. But even SMART people makes BAD decisions and thats the point here and it goes for both sides of course.
But at the moment the 360 is the only real nextGen console we have so in the end when PS3 comes along we will see who made the better jobb.

 

[fearsomepirate]

In the end what will matter is good engineering on the cooling system and fanspeeds depending on the load IMO. Also has the design and finish of the PS3 been adjusted with these things in mind, well of course it has but how does it work.

A big question here is design philosophy. Both of MS's machines very much have this "How powerful can we build it for $XXX.XX?" sort of approach. Iroonically, despite being a much more overall well-thought design, the 360 in particular seems to have cooling as a secondary thought; e.g. they made these massively powerful chips and then set around trying to figure out how to cool them and keep them fed with juice once they were done. If Sony's kept cooling and power issues in mind from phase one of development, it's quite conceivable that their machine will end up quieter and colder than MS's.

 

[OtakingGX]

A big question here is design philosophy. Both of MS's machines very much have this "How powerful can we build it for $XXX.XX?" sort of approach. Iroonically, despite being a much more overall well-thought design, the 360 in particular seems to have cooling as a secondary thought; e.g. they made these massively powerful chips and then set around trying to figure out how to cool them and keep them fed with juice once they were done. If Sony's kept cooling and power issues in mind from phase one of development, it's quite conceivable that their machine will end up quieter and colder than MS's.

Keeping cooling and power issues in mind from phase one would entail an educated guess at phase one. So someone at IBM would have to throw out a number they made up about the power requirements of the processor. Then you add a buffer to that estimate, and design with that number in mind. So if IBM gave MS a guess of 60W early on and MS's engineers decided to give themselves a cushion of 30% they'd design for 78W. Then IBM comes back later and says "Oops, it's actually 85W" and MS has to try to adapt their design to accomodate the extra heat dissipation.

With the exponential increases in chip power dissipation pretty soon it'll probably be commonplace to have a house full of electronics that sound like your refrigerator when you turn them on and they fire up their compressors.

 

[Thegameman]

How exactly am I wrong? Everything I stated was true except my conclusion which is my opinion, if you don't agree with it, that's not my problem.

Is not true cuz even that the DC has not EA suport it did had others including Namco very close to Sony and which make SC,regarded as one of the best fighting games ever make.


Been a first timer doesn't justified MS loss in the console market,in fact that was the case with PS in 1994 vs market leader Nintendo and vs an alot stronger finalcialy Sega,yet the PS sold 100 million units.


You are escusing MS for something they din't them self,in fact i had quotes of MS dissmising any damage from been a newbie on the market,so if they din't think it was an issue then why do you think it is now after they loss.

They didn't start out with much support, they had to earn it, they still don't have much support in Japan when compared to how many games get released on PS2. It's not instantaneous, I think everyone knows that.

They did had alot more than DC and GC for that matter,and they did had EA they had great suport from Sega as well,and they will never had it cuz the console doesn't sell in Japan,in fact even with a FF 11 demo the 360 floped hard.

You are neglecting all that stuff I said about MS's first console. Nintendo have been in the console business for over 20 years, that's a big difference compared the Xbox starting out. There are diehard Nintendo fans that will support the console until they stop gaming. MS doesn't have such a luxury, I repeat again... first console, limited third-party support to begin with and a bad initial image because of the press and even Kutaragi.

In fact not that is a big escuse,the same thing happen to Sony on 1994 when they were the newbie,and Nintendo was the market leader then,unlike now that Nintendo is not even a shadow in the console market of what they once were.


Sony beat a strong Nintendo by some 68 millions units on the PS vs N64 battle and Sony was a newbie,MS beat an already weak Nintendo by 4 million units or less.


Is funny how people see Nintendo as strong when is GC vs Xbox numbers time,yet when is GC vs PS2 number time many claim nintendo is already weak.


In fact you say Nintendo still has some die hard fans that will suport Nintendo until the comes for them,yet that MS din't had the same,if you realy think that is the case now think how it was on 1994 when Nintendo was the market leader and not just a close 3rd.


Kuturagi in 1994 was unknown on the console market so i din't know were you are trying to go with that one.

In fact Bill Gates is millions of times more known on the console market by 2001 than Kuturagi was back in 1994,and still they win.

 

[Edge]

With the exponential increases in chip power dissipation pretty soon it'll probably be commonplace to have a house full of electronics that sound like your refrigerator when you turn them on and they fire up their compressors.

LOL, so true.

Now onto the question of vents. More of them or less of them, and their placement. It's not so much the number, but what the air flow has to flow through that also has to be considered. My PC is very quiet with one fan in the front pulling air in, and one fan in the back pulling air out, and of course a fan on the GPU and CPU, and powersupply. I made sure to get large slower moving fans, but the noise I hear is air turbulence. It's not loud, but it sure is noticable.

Now Sony's design is questionable as one could argue, where is it pulling air in, but my guess would be they have a loop, with one side of that air vents pulling air in, and the other side letting air out. The problem with that, is that some of your hot air will get pulled back in.

I wonder if such a design would help minimize dust coming into the system, especially since a lot of people like to place their consoles on the floor level, where it can be very dusty. Vents at the bottom of the console probably contributes to more internal dust overtime, and thus greater chance of less air flow over time, and eventually possible component failure. I would say vents higher up the sides of the console would be better.

Anyway, I'm sure Sony will do a good job on the cooling issue, but I doubt the PS3 will be quiet, as Kaz Harai (president and chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment), has already said that it will be as loud as the original PS2. I have the slim PS2, so I don't know how loud that is. The slim PS2 is virtually quiet, as I can't here the fans or the drive over the game sound, but turning the sound off, you can hear the fans, which are not loud at all.

Sony with all it's consumer manfacturing expertise, along with years of notebook and PC manufacturing, are experts on cooling, and will provide an adaquate solution, especially as time goes on, as chip shrinks down to 0.45nm will mean lower power, and thus smaller heatsinks and fans.

Any thoughts on what I shared here?

 

[MechanizedDeath]

Keeping cooling and power issues in mind from phase one would entail an educated guess at phase one. So someone at IBM would have to throw out a number they made up about the power requirements of the processor. Then you add a buffer to that estimate, and design with that number in mind. So if IBM gave MS a guess of 60W early on and MS's engineers decided to give themselves a cushion of 30% they'd design for 78W. Then IBM comes back later and says "Oops, it's actually 85W" and MS has to try to adapt their design to accomodate the extra heat dissipation.

With the exponential increases in chip power dissipation pretty soon it'll probably be commonplace to have a house full of electronics that sound like your refrigerator when you turn them on and they fire up their compressors.

From my experience, packaging is one of the last things done, and relatively easy. You just need the form factor of the final production board (or a range at least) and then it's simply a function of fitting the required CFMs with the required aesthetic. It's not like they do wind tunnel testing or any real aerodynamic modeling on these cases. If they did, it would be a colossal waste. With the kind of airflow they're looking at, you can draw up a case design in Paint in a second, so long as the air channel passes over key components. I think getting the aesthetic (looks/appearance) down would have taken longer, and would be fairly unaffected by the heat production of the board. Just my two pence learned in my engineering design classes so many years ago. PEACE.

 

[Edge]

Perhaps you meant not vents, but fans? (IIRC Microsoft wanted 1 big fan but ended up with 2 smaller fans)

That might have been smart on MS part, cause if one fan fails, the other still will work, but may increase in speed to make up the difference. The increase in volume though may have the user check to see what the problem is, and send the unit in for repair, before the second fan fails, and thus save on major component failure.

Personally I think having one large and yet slower RPM fan would be better, and just have the system shut down if it gets too hot, due to fan failure. Does the Xbox 360 have a shutdown method incase of critical temperatures being reached?

 

[overclocked]

A big question here is design philosophy. Both of MS's machines very much have this "How powerful can we build it for $XXX.XX?" sort of approach. Iroonically, despite being a much more overall well-thought design, the 360 in particular seems to have cooling as a secondary thought; e.g. they made these massively powerful chips and then set around trying to figure out how to cool them and keep them fed with juice once they were done. If Sony's kept cooling and power issues in mind from phase one of development, it's quite conceivable that their machine will end up quieter and colder than MS's.

I agree with this resoning but i cant know what gone through the heads of MS people so i back on just that one

As a sidenote im sure Sony analysies with a microscope what the reactions has been on the 360 and will do the best they can to see that those issues is minimized to their best of efforts.

 

[Seb555]

From my experience, packaging is one of the last things done, and relatively easy. You just need the form factor of the final production board (or a range at least) and then it's simply a function of fitting the required CFMs with the required aesthetic. It's not like they do wind tunnel testing or any real aerodynamic modeling on these cases. If they did, it would be a colossal waste. With the kind of airflow they're looking at, you can draw up a case design in Paint in a second, so long as the air channel passes over key components. I think getting the aesthetic (looks/appearance) down would have taken longer, and would be fairly unaffected by the heat production of the board. Just my two pence learned in my engineering design classes so many years ago. PEACE.

That would be a mistake. Having any number of heat generatin elements ( GPU, Cell, etc ) in a unit each having it's own heatsink ( perhaps even fans ) can generate a lot of turbulence inside a case causing mush less then optimal cooling as well as additional noise. A PC case is huge so the amount of that turbulence generated is minimized. The PS and xbox cases are relatively small and tightly packed, just drawing something that looks good won't work.

An why would you even bother taking such "swag" job at it anyways when there are so many nice fluid dynamics packages that will simulate airflow, temperature distribution, etc, for relatively small amount of $$$?

 

[Megadrive1988]

It would make sense for RSX to have at least some of the feature-set that NV50 will have.


The Xbox 360's Xenos goes significantly beyond Shader Model 3.0 but the G70 ~ 7800 GTX sticks alot closer to the base 3.0 spec even if it too goes a little beyond it -- Xenos is much closer to Shader 4.0 spec than G70 is, so why would Sony settle for a Cell-optimised G70 ? If RSX is based more on NV50 that *would* probably nix a spring launch, but it would be worth it.

 

[pegisys]

It would make sense for RSX to have at least some of the feature-set that NV50 will have.


The Xbox 360's Xenos goes significantly beyond Shader Model 3.0 but the G70 ~ 7800 GTX sticks alot closer to the base 3.0 spec even if it too goes a little beyond it -- Xenos is much closer to Shader 4.0 spec than G70 is, so why would Sony settle for a Cell-optimised G70 ? If RSX is based more on NV50 that *would* probably nix a spring launch, but it would be worth it.

the whole shader model thing is a directx standard, microsoft is the one who comes up with the spec as far as I know, and since sony is using opengl es and the opengl 2.0 spec is still kinda new I doubt it will matter, the RSX will probably fine tuned for opengl es fragment shaders

 

[overclocked]

It would make sense for RSX to have at least some of the feature-set that NV50 will have.


The Xbox 360's Xenos goes significantly beyond Shader Model 3.0 but the G70 ~ 7800 GTX sticks alot closer to the base 3.0 spec even if it too goes a little beyond it -- Xenos is much closer to Shader 4.0 spec than G70 is, so why would Sony settle for a Cell-optimised G70 ? If RSX is based more on NV50 that *would* probably nix a spring launch, but it would be worth it.

Well i think either way its not going to matter in the end what label the chip has.
If you think G70@550MHz is a dud then well, hehe..
Drawing the the minimum baseline there is the healthiest thing to do for the moment when the final spec is almost here.

Expect it to "just" have that beast in it will make ANY change from that seem like a BIG bonus! Dont get me wrong cause i am climbing on the walls almost now...

 

[MechanizedDeath]

That would be a mistake. Having any number of heat generatin elements ( GPU, Cell, etc ) in a unit each having it's own heatsink ( perhaps even fans ) can generate a lot of turbulence inside a case causing mush less then optimal cooling as well as additional noise. A PC case is huge so the amount of that turbulence generated is minimized. The PS and xbox cases are relatively small and tightly packed, just drawing something that looks good won't work.

An why would you even bother taking such "swag" job at it anyways when there are so many nice fluid dynamics packages that will simulate airflow, temperature distribution, etc, for relatively small amount of $$$?

Airflow is something people do in minutes in their bedrooms. Turbulence and general aerodynamics means relatively little at the kinds of wind speeds here. It's just about moving enough air with minimal obstruction. I'd wager heatsink design is far more important. I don't see the point in breaking a sweat over a box. You could accomodate airflow after selecting the aesthetic look that you want. You only need aero packages if you want to manipulate pressure points to generate thrust, or to minimize noise. But turbulence on CE devices is marginal. Most of the turbulent noise comes from the fans. When you shrink the casing, you might also have to worry since wind speeds will increase. PEACE.

 

[m1nd_x]

Is not true cuz even that the DC has not EA suport it did had others including Namco very close to Sony and which make SC,regarded as one of the best fighting games ever make.

You aren't proving anything... most of what you typed is just wrong...

-Sega was on it's way out... losing developer support, financially unable to keep up it's console operations. This was Playstation 2's initial competition.

-How can you say MS started out with more support than DC? DC was canned a long time ago and they still have more games released on their system than MS does with Xbox.

-N64 vs. Playstation was a wash because of bad decisions on Nintendo's part to make developer take the burden of their costly cartridges when compared to Sony's cheaper PS1 cds and more storage. That screw up cost them lots of lost developer support and the big kicker... Final Fantasy VII. Once again, where is the competition? Those are big screw ups... Saturn had nothing going for. Was Sony facing a big battle from Jaguar?

-The FF11 demo flopped? It's a beta-testing demo that is free with Xbox360 in Japan. If you're going to try to argue something, at least do it without silly comments like this, I refuse to believe that you're naive enough to even venture to assume that you thought "Final Fantasy XI" was MS's attempt at a killer app for Japan.

You're trying real hard and not proving anything with your statements, why don't you just cut to the chase and say that Sony is infaliable and you want Xbox 360 and Revolutioin to perform horribly.

 

[OtakingGX]

That would be a mistake. Having any number of heat generatin elements ( GPU, Cell, etc ) in a unit each having it's own heatsink ( perhaps even fans ) can generate a lot of turbulence inside a case causing mush less then optimal cooling as well as additional noise. A PC case is huge so the amount of that turbulence generated is minimized. The PS and xbox cases are relatively small and tightly packed, just drawing something that looks good won't work.

An why would you even bother taking such "swag" job at it anyways when there are so many nice fluid dynamics packages that will simulate airflow, temperature distribution, etc, for relatively small amount of $$$?

Turbulence is actually a good thing when you're trying to convect heat. Think of it as the cooler air far away from your heatsink mixing with the warm air right next to it. There are many good software packages out there for heatsinks. Any engineer working on the problem would know what they are and how to use them effectively.

One fan would be ideal. One 20CFM fan would definitely be cheaper than two 10CFM fans. Sometimes packaging and other constraints won't allow for the ideal choice though.