how about a Forum topic for laptops/notebooks?

dan · Post by **dan** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 12:49 pm

hey Mike C and edward NG,
what about a forum thread on recommended notebooks/laptops and how to keep them quiet?

shathal · Post by **shathal** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 1:54 pm

Is there a lot you *can* do?

You can replace the HD, sure (not that this is cheap), but custom-building a laptop is sure a lot harder (not to say, expensive) than a "normal" rig.

How much can be done here, I wonder?

the_smell · Post by **the_smell** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 2:16 pm

You'd hope that since laptops use the parts we'd all like to have in desktop form (low power CPU, quiet HD, etc), they should be pretty quiet.

If people have got noisey laptops they could try the passive cooler nexus makes - but I don't know how good it is. It's been mensioned before here:
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... top+cooler

I've just got an asus M6722NBH (centrino based) laptop and it's pretty quiet most of the time, if you're doing more CPU intensive stuff it occationally blows out a lot of hot air in one go. I think most laptops tend to do this, the problem being the moment you start to build in large heatsinks the whole things gets a bit bulky.

wumpus · Post by **wumpus** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 3:47 pm

yeah, #1 laptops don't come up that often (the average laptop is fairly quiet, certainly FAR quieter than the average desktop), and #2, even if it did-- what can you do? customization opportunities in a laptop are very limited.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 5:47 am

The two main sources of notebook noise are the CPU cooling fan (when it's actually running) which are almost all those awful, whiney 40mm or 30mm fans, and the HDD.

There's nothing you can do to quiet those fans down, except keep them from running. This is where a cool-running CPU like the Banias that's found in the Centrino systems is worth it's weight in gold. At the other end of the spectrum are the silly notebooks that use a regular desktop P4 CPU stuffed into a notebook chassis. This is a recipe for a noisy system. These things run much hotter than the Centrino CPUs and the cooling fans will be running constantly (another big problem with the desktop CPUs is that they are very power hungry and your on-battery run time will be much shorter than the thrifty Centrinos).

As far as HDDs go, it's the luck of the draw as to what you end up with. Notebook drives run the spectrum from damn quiet to nearly as loud as desktop drives. You'd need to find out which particular drive would be used in the notebook that you're considering and then do some research about it's acoustic characteristics.

That's about it for notebooks. They're all very proprietary so you can't just start swapping out components in search of the Holy Grail of Silence. All you can really change is the HDD. That's why I don't feel that it's necessary to have a separate forum for notebooks. I'd put the notebook threads in the "Pre-built and SFF" forums.