I remember seeing this a year ago. It's a bit worrying that in that time they still haven't gotten around to building a prototype that will be as quiet as the claimed final product. While that doesn't mean it can't be done, it may point to deeper issues in the project such as yet unaddressed technical challenges or lack of funding (which might in turn suggest lack of investor conviction).
Personally I'm curious what the failure rate will look like with these things. Given it will probably be higher than existing PC cooling fans which are moving lighter loads, this may indeed be a problem.
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.
They probably should look at this for server cooling as well. At 2u or smaller those things are leaf blower loud, and there’s a lot of depth in those cases that could be sacrificed for decibels.
This is a wonderful project. It looks very sharp and has pretty good components.
However, it's usually significantly better, cheaper and easier to build an "almost" silent system, just by using good heatsinks and very slow fans. A small amount of airflow is usually significantly better than none at all.
When are we going to move away from mechanical fans for cooling? They seem to be the weakest link in every board that has a fan on it and die a horrible noisy death at some point way before you expect and they're noisy even when they're new. Surely they can design better?
seems iffy, might be useful alongside traditional cooling.
1. high frequency stuff to drive this thing might make noise an issue.
2. wouldn't it have to be integrated into the chip your cooling to optimize the effectiveness?
3. the wording leads me to believe their "performance" is cooling to noise ratio and not just cooling.
IDGAF about noise as long as it doesn't sound like in a server closet, i just want to keep things under 90c with a margin for hot days, crapped out a/c.
this is just a solid state fan. cool for sure, potentially very useful (industrial/embedded will probably love it), but marketing needs to calm down.
I'd love to have a desktop like this, but I wonder how loud they are. I'd expect that POWER9 Heatsink/Fan assemblies are made more for data center use, where noise is an afterthought.
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.
>That the rack is quiet wasn’t really deliberate (and we are frankly much more interested in the often hidden power draw that blaring fan noise represents).
They optimized for power. That roar of fan noise doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a better job cooling.
Jumping to the conclusion based on pure conjecture ?
See their launch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8 where they specifically mention how quiet it is (and the noise profile in the video indeed seems not annoying at all).
That's not how the dB scale works, though. It's a logarithmic scale, so even negative values can still represent a minuscule amount of sound. And absolute silence is impossible because there's always going to be some background noise. But as long as the computer is quieter than the background noise, you're fine.
In any case, interesting project. I built my first silent PC 11 years ago; it's still working, but not as silent as it was back then. A built a replacement last year and it's much quieter, but still not a silent as the build from the article.
Hooking everything up to external heat sinks has always seemed like the most obvious solution to move beyond the really quiet fans and internal (semi)passive cooling, but it's way too much work for my taste. Glad to see someone has done it.
This does look interesting, PC building has improved by bounds and bounds in recent times, giving me better performance and longevity for my money. This fanless design is worth a consideration, the current go-to for people who want silence is AIO liquid coolers. They aren't terrible but do affect radiator placement. If this NH P1 can be prove viable for gaming setups it might take off.
> Nonetheless, I strapped on Noctua’s NF-A15 fan and tested the NH-P1 again. The added fan increased the total cooling capacity from 150W to 200W in long term cooling scenarios.
>"As someone who's been obsessed with silent computing for nearly two decades, just looking at the picture of that fan makes my ears hurt."
I bought 2 Pi4s with different cases. Both came with the same type of fan that looks like one in the article and set of heatsinks. As a person who actually tried it I can assure you that those are absolutely silent. No discernable sound comes out.
Only because there's no need for them not to be. it's common to retrofit slower spinning quieter fans into servers for home/office use.
But the same design constraints were used in a mini-itx gaming PC on the linus tech tips channel a few months ago.. I can't seem to find the video now though. The thermal performance was amazing.
Exactly. We already have silent and fanless tablets so I'm not sure why GE would be so troubled to get "almost silent" coolers.
How can the Dell Mini 9 be fanless, though? I don't think any Atom processor besides the smartphone-only Medfield is fanless. My old EeePC is also quite noisy when loading stuff, and it gets quite hot, too.
As someone who's been obsessed with silent computing for nearly two decades, just looking at the picture of that fan makes my ears hurt. Tiny fans are invariably whiney. The surface area of the blades is barely larger than that of the motor. Running it at 3V instead of 5V will make it move barely any air.
The Pi 4 can easily be passively cooled, you just need a slightly bigger heat sink. It pains me to see that they went the quick and dirty way with that crappy little fan. That case has a huge surface area. It's what, ~9x7cm? Passive solutions would have been pretty easy, and probably not much more expensive than the $5 fan. And if you really want a fan, at least get a 50mm fan, so you can spin it slowly and still actually move air.
If I had to guess I'd say it's because the video is targeted at people for which this will be obvious. They aren't looking to sell this directly to consumers. They want to license the cooling technology. As far as they are concerned, the noise of the motor is probably as irrelevant as the bracket's color.
Personally I'm curious what the failure rate will look like with these things. Given it will probably be higher than existing PC cooling fans which are moving lighter loads, this may indeed be a problem.
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