Quiet Laptop Advice Please
Hi all,
I bought an Acer Aspire 5004 a little over a year ago and the fan has gradually gotten louder and louder, and now it's an annoying whirring noise that is forcing me to buy a new notebook.
Anyway, I was hoping somewhere to find a definitive list or way to determine which laptops are going to be quieter than others. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find that. I did find some anecdotal intelligence that I collected which I am posting below. Please post with any knowledge that you might have about laptop quietness - I'm hoping this thread will become a repository of knowledge with regards to quiet laptops, so that those who follow in my footsteps will be able to quickly find what they need to know.
I thank you in advance for your help!!
If you'd like to help me specifically, I filled out questions relevant to my decision below.
Laptop Quietness Intelligence:
- Intel tend to be quieter than comparable AMDs
- Pentium quieter than celeron/sempron. Core 2 duo probably louder but can undervolt
- Quieter manufacturers: HP (in particular dv1000, dv6000, and dv6220), Lenovo/IBM ThinkPads (e.g. T60, X22)
- Louder manufacturers: Acer (especially Aspire 5004), Toshiba
- Mixed reviews: Sony (some models loud, FE series seems to be quiet), Dell (X1 is fanless but expensive, but Dimension 8200 is loud)
- Lower build quality may indicate it will get louder over time (Acer and Toshiba)
- silentpcreview.com has some good stuff, but light in coverage of notebooks
General Questions
1) What is your budget? Prefer to spend from $700 to $1100
2) What size notebook would you prefer? No preference. I don't need portability, and don't require a minimum size
4) Are there any brands that you prefer or any you really don't like? I'm looking for a PC (i.e. not a MAC)
5) What tasks will you be performing with the notebook? General stuff, maybe light gaming
9) Do you mind buying online without seeing the notebook in person? If I'm confident it will be quiet I'll be ok, but probably more comfortable hearing it in person
13) Are the notebook's looks and stylishness important to you? No
16) Do you need an optical drive? If yes, a DVD-ROM, DVD-CD/RW or DVD-RW drive? I would prefer DVD-RW but not a deal-breaker
**) Operating System: I don't want Vista, but I have XP installation DVDs so I'm assuming I can overinstall XP onto Vista
**) Noise level: The constant fan noise is driving me crazy. I would like an ultraquiet fan. It is ok for it to be a little louder during heavy-use, but as long as it is more of a air whooshing (rather than a mechanical whirring). Hard drive noise is not as important since it is not constant and not always occurring.
Answer:
Re: Quiet Laptop Advice Please
Well, first off, you can't say that a processor can be quieter than others. CPU's dont generate noise. Their cooling mechanisms do, and those are determined/built by OEMs. For example, I can have a Core 2 Duo E6600 overclocked and cooled by my Thermalright XP120 with a Nexus 120mm fan on it and it is nearly silent. On the other hand, I could get a very high speed fan instead of the low speed Nexus, put it on there, and that would be very loud.
I believe the proper terminology is just heat output. Even then that gets complicated in terms of new designs, manufacturing processes, etc etc. And for laptop noise, you also have to consider everything else that is in the laptop, aka, video card, 5400 vs 4200 vs 7200 RPM HDD, CPU load, etc. There are also other ways to controlling laptop noise, including fan control, setting the hard drive to spin down after a certain amount of inactivity, and even the hard drives have a certain amount of idle noise that contributes to the overall noise produced by the laptop, especially 7200 RPM laptop hard drives like the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 that I have in mine.
As for brands, I do not know much about that. I had an HP DV5035NR about a year ago, and it was pretty quiet. I now have a T60 and it is even quieter. Have you looked at Gateway also? I am sure other people will join in on this thread and help you further, i just wanted to clarify a few things to make sure you know the concept of "quietness" in a laptop, which in itself is relative compared to what you consider as quiet and what I think as quiet.
Answer:
Re: Quiet Laptop Advice Please
If you can get a Dell Latitude D820, that would be a great fit for your needs because it is very quiet. The ThinkPad T60 is also worth looking at but I think that's all you will be able to do, because it's most likely out of your budget range. Consider the R-series as an alternative, it is more budget oriented and still has excellent quality.
Answer:
Re: Quiet Laptop Advice Please
I agree with the above comment about fan design. A big fan spinning slowly will make much less noise than a smaller fan which needs to spin much faster to achieve the same airflow. Slim notebooks tend to have have slim fans. The more heat a fan has to remove and the faster it spins then the sooner it will wear its bearings and become even noisier.
Fans wouldn't be needed if the hardware ran cooler. I've got a Fujitsu P2020 with a 633MHz Crusoe CPU and no fan at all. The drawback is that Windows doesn't run very fast (but I blame that on 128MB of non-upgradeable RAM).
Your ideal quiet hardware may have a fan, but it will only come on under heavy load. A bigger chassis provides greater opportunity for heat dissipation though conduction and convection. Avoid dedicated GPUs and look for a low voltage CPU.
You may also find my of fan activity on the Samsung X60plus to be of interest.
Some reviews do look at fan noise. The PC Pro magazine in UK includes noise measurements in some group reviews but this info doesn't seem to get into the summaries on the web site. However, I'm not sure how decibel measurements take account of frequency.
John