There's probably a market for an eGPU enclosure which can sit in a shared office without sounding like a small jet engine, though. Some of them are quite noisy.
You say you don't get it, but then you boast how your gear is basically silent. Great, that's what I want too!
But I'm not talking about your custom-built gaming PC, we're talking about an eGPU case for a Macbook.
My experience with these type of peripherals (eg external hard drives) is they often say they have a 'quiet fan' but it's not really quiet. And I think it's something I read about being a problem with other eGPU cases.
I have this stuff in my living room. The Macbook is basically silent. I don't want a bunch of noisy fans to come on (they all add up...) every time I dock the laptop and try to do some work.
I won't be gaming. I might have headphones on to do some video editing, if my partner is trying to do her own work in the same room. But I don't want to be obliged to wear them just because of noisy hardware.
This kind of proposal has been cropping up for over 15 years now and always end up not really working out. We actually looked seriously into this as an option when we moved into a new office and two major issues were immediate dealbreakers:
1. The depreciation cost of new hardware made this economically a no go. With second hand hardware, there was some number fiddling you could do to make it kind of work until it required any kind of human intervention whatsoever, then the labor costs dwarf the savings.
2. Computer enclosures are not designed to minimize the db/W/$. Low noise computers are generally achieved by reducing the power of parts and using expensive materials. High wattage computers tend to be extremely noisy. We couldn't be having a noisy heating system in our workplace, distracting everybody.
There are discreet graphic cards with passive cooling available. The power-hungry models fitted with dual 120mm fans and a large heatsink are not too noisy either.
> I'd love to just buy half a dozen used Dell PowerEdges but rack-mounted hardware is insanely loud.
This is a common belief that isn’t quite correct. My 2U Dell R520 is quite quiet after the initial boot (once the BMC takes over fan control), albeit I had to do some ipmitool magic to get it to not ramp them up with non-OEM PCIe cards installed.
My 1U R420 and R320 boxes? Yeah, they’re a little loud, 40mm fans have to run at higher speeds to get air flowing.
Ultimately my lab lives in my home office and the noise doesn’t really bother me, I wouldn’t put it in the bedroom or living room though.
Imagine people don't want a big expensive bulky hot laptop to play games, but want something smaller for work, and pay for a service to play a game without hearing fan noise.
I'm curious about how much fan noise there really is. They talk about the Thelio looking nice enough to live on the desktop, but IMO the reason people put their Linux box under their desk isn't necessarily because it's ugly: it's to mitigate the fan noise.
I don't care much about walnut or maple; I just want quiet fans.
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.
> Doesn't that heavily depend on usage? At least I've never had a laptop which wouldn't turn into a noise generator once you start compiling, computing or heavy imaging/editing.
Exactly. For the past decade I've built desktop computers that are silent no matter the load (I don't do any GPU heavy work). I really cannot say that for my work laptops.
The problem is that high performance builds produce a lot of heat, and those tiny cases do not have enough space to let that be easily extracted with low RPM high diameter fans, so you are going to end up with a pretty box that is going to be pretty noisy, unless you stick to lower power consuming and thus lower heat producing laptop like parts.
Interesting that the author had fan nose / heat issues with the Lenovo Ryzen mini PC.
I really hope AMD and OEMs get it together and make sure thermal design for their PCs allows for stability and noise reduction. Older HP workstations are a good choice for noise, price and power.
I have my noisy 2U machines under a bed in my downstairs room - but that requires a hard wired home and a spare room.
I can't wait for laptops to start including the 30xx series NVidia cards in it and replace mine, because my current one is so awfully noisy. The sound of the USB circuitry in my laptop processing my mouse movements is louder than the sound of my mouse moving across the mouse pad, and when I'm moving a bunch of data around the SSD in my laptop makes as much noise as the physical hard disk it replaced! I am constantly in awe of how noisy some things that aren't supposed to be physically moving at all can be.
Noise bothers me, I even get bothered by the heads resting in a hard drive. It seems that the quieter you get your environment - the more bothered you can become. I've a pretty decent asus gfx card that remains unused, because it has an onboard fan. Both my desktop and laptop are whisper quiet.
I had a friend with a Pentium 4 machine, that he just kept in a nearby cupboard. Once shut behind the door, you couldn't hear it at all. If I was a home owner (and could modify my house at will,) I'd probably just place my PC in another room (preferably a store), and channel cables through the wall. Would be cheaper than wasting money on over-priced cooling. The good thing about this, is that you also don't have to worry so much about what your PC looks like. You can even mount a motherboard in something like a biscuit tin.
Yeah, the one big thing that this one has going for it is its noiselessness due to using its case as a heat sink. Torvalds has also talked about how he wants a "whisper-quiet" computing environment; I'm surprised that so few companies treat this as a design target. It's probably more popular among computers designed to be used as thin clients, which it looks like the mintBox is.
It's nice to see how much you can compress into that small package, though.
Why does it need to be quiet though? Don't most of these live in a datacentre with no humans around? I assume you will say you want to keep it in your office or similar, but then I'll just ask again - why exactly?
I’m tempted by a desktop but I worry about noise. Typically power components == big cooling reqs == big fans == big noise. There are specialized vendors who guarantee quiet but obviously they cost more.
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