Not without adding four or five pounds of heatsinks, and larger fans. Bigger fans = less noise. A desktop machine with four 120mm fans will be quieter than your laptop.
Computer noise is a function of hardware design. It's true that lower-power hardware is easier to cool, but on a laptop space constraints prevent you from implementing proper (quiet) cooling solutions. There, you really are trading performance against noise.
My homebuilt desktop is an overclocked 4GHz 8500 with a 4870 video card. It uses over 300W when pushed, but is still practically inaudible due to its water cooling and 250mm fan radiator tucked away in the corner under the desk.
I recently bought a top of the line Framework, 1280p i7 processor and 64GB RAM, 2TB Samsung 850x SSD.
But these laptop fans are so loud. Even for non intensive tasks like navigating code in an otherwise idle IntelliJ. Or just watching a YouTube video. CPU for all the 20 cores will hover at 20% but the fans will spin really hard.
This when compared to my earlier HP Elitebook 850 G7 - which is basically silent for all these tasks.
Performance improvements are there but not sure if I can continue to tolerate the fan noise. My build times for my projects are around 3mins vs 3:30 mins. Seriously considering if I should return it. But I also want to like it.
I've also been using a Ryzen7 mini-pc, it spins up the fans when maxes out, but doesn't sound or behave any different than any laptop, except its a box. It's actually very quiet most of the time, until I have to process a photo in Lightroom or play a game.
I hear framework laptops can be quite loud though? With ARM Mac laptops, you have the choice between a machine which literally doesn't have a fan, and a machine which has a fan that's turned off unless you're maxing out both your CPU and your GPU for sustained periods of time (and even then it's just a wind sound, not a high pitched whine). The machines are great about coil whine too, which has been an issue for some PC laptops I've used even when their fan is off.
The fan on my laptop is quiet unless I'm doing something very power-intensive like an 8-way parallel compile. It will probably depend on the CPU model you get though.
The speakers and keyboard feel fine to me, but that's very subjective. Speaking of subjective, this feels like the most solidly constructed laptop I've ever used.
Oh, by far this is the quietest laptop I've used. Most of the time. If I'm playing a game or docker pegs a cpu, that changes. It may still be better than other laptops, I don't know anymore, but once the fans get about 3k they start to get pretty loud. Below that I don't really hear them.
Apple Macbooks are the obvious answer. The Air models don't even have fans.
Or you might take your PC and tune its processor power plans to be less aggressive, or limit TDP settings. That said, my previous Thinkpad E14 wasn't that loud even with high loads, without tweaking anything.
But also, consider my Asus gaming laptop, G14. It's relatively silent but on default settings hard crashes about once an hour due to overheating. Perhaps loud fans are preferable to that.
> Being completely silent is a major selling point for me and I would be willing to sacrifice some performance for it. The Air should be silent as it doesn't have any active cooling.
If you're willing to tolerate a low amount of noise, I find that laptop coolers with very large fans (200mm) work great. The large fan generates a high volume of airflow, but the the low fan speed means that it's almost silent.
As someone that can hear a lot of "ultrasonic" frequencies, I would not assume it would be quiet. Those ultrasonic occupancy sensors are TERRIBLE. Your "quiet" laptop might be worse since the sound would be continuous instead of loud bursts.
I second the noise point. If you do "GPU-intensive tasks" (i.e., gaming...) and you actually have a laptop with sufficiently powerful graphics card do run them, dissipating that power will mean running the tiny fans at full speed, and that's loud. To quietly get rid of that power, you need large-area flow, and that means a desktop.
That, and the cost-efficiency of a powerful desktop, is what prevents me from going all-mobile.
reply