I don't know anything about it, however the power consumption is non trivial: 5.25 W (net 4.25 W) Maximum noise inside device at 50 cm 21 dBA. Maximum power consumption 1 W. A laptop fan is around 2.25W or so for the whole operation and it can definitely dissipate more than 10W produced. A laptop will need 5 or so, more if it has any discreet GPU.
Funny note of the site - everything is metric (even pressure is Pascals, distances for the noise is cm - 50), but the airflow is in cfm (cubic feet per minute)
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.
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 remember seeing the precursor to this some 10-12 years ago. Can't recall if it was the same company or not. The prototype looked like a block of very densely packed sheets of carbon fiber - imagine a typical car radiator but with finer and thinner fins made of some black plastic-like material - and once energized the sheets would oscillate in a way such that air got sucked through the block at impressive speeds. The prototype wasn't particularly silent.
On the whole this idea doesn't seem like it's going to do much for laptops now that Arm is entering the scene. Maybe it'll make a good solution for noisy graphics cards.
Thank you. I am looking for a quiet laptop (currently using a VAIO) to run linux and I came to the conclusion that I better run it in a VM if I want to minimize fan noise.
But consider that a lot of people live in environments so loud that for a lot of laptops the max fan noise is at best a mild nuisance, at least with modern laptops.
Also a lot of laptop gaming is done with headphones.
Then there is the problem that measuring fan noise is harder to do then measuring performance, for the first you just have to run benchmarks in a "normal" temperate room, for the later you need a consistent not too loud noise environment.
Some of us want the highest performance CPU and GPU possible in our laptop, but that requires a fan, but a silent fan would be a real value add over the current ones. Personally I'm happy to hear this, hope it makes it way into production laptops soon.
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.
The fan isn’t any worse than compiling code on a MacBook Pro for me so I don’t really mind, it’s just something I accept with the form factor of the laptop. Also, it’s a Ryzen desktop CPU in a laptop that doesn’t throttle, so my expectations for the fan being quiet were low.
I use an external webcam with an external monitor most of the time.
I almost bought one but then got curious about its fan noise level, read a bit on the internet and decided I wouldn't risk it. I still remember a laptop computer I barely used because of a whining coil. Fan noise that sounds like leaf blowers are a turn-off for me and I can't use headphones because of tinnitus :/.
> 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.
I wish more manufacturers worked harder to keep fan noise down to between none and barely audible without severely throttling the CPU and GPU or toasting your lap. My laptop shouldn't be spinning up its fan just because I plugged in something as pedestrian as a 2560x1440 60hz monitor (as my ThinkPad X1 Nano likes to).
Funny note of the site - everything is metric (even pressure is Pascals, distances for the noise is cm - 50), but the airflow is in cfm (cubic feet per minute)
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