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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 invariabl
by elric 6y ago
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.
- Scoundreller 6y agoFans are cheaper than the thermostatic equivalent of aluminum or copper. And less over-design required for “rough-service” environments. While inefficient. You could always put some 1n400x diodes in series with your fan and drop 5V down in 0.6V increments. Even cheaper 1n4148s could do as the current is small enough. These days, I really prefer fans because they help cool everything. Bad caps are my nemesis...
- est31 6y agoWhen I went passive on my desktop 4 years ago after having to endure an extremely loud fan, I was constantly surprised at the beginning that one is able to do computing without noticing any sound at all. Now it's become a part of my normal expectations. I run a big workload and it doesn't make any sound. Beautiful.
- enriquto 6y agoHa! I actually like the noises that the computer makes. They are sort of reassuring. A computer that is always silent regardless of whether it idles or churns a lot of compute, is very creepy. Give me clunky mechanical keyboards and noisy fans!
- sildur 6y agoI miss the sound of the hard drive as an indicator of I/O activity.
- enriquto 6y agoSometimes the motherboard makes a similar, but much softer, hum.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI’m surprised someone hasn’t made a SATA MITM that does this. I once put an LED in series on a long rs232 link so I could see them flash when I/O was happening. But they have the spare voltage to work with.
- alistairSH 6y agoOr the sound of a modem to let you know the internet is working? Nothing sounds better than two pulsing, clicking sine waves finding each other after long last, making love, and giving birth to white noise. No thanks, I'll take all my computers and electronics as quiet as possible.
- lolc 6y agoMy little desk-computer has a pretty dirty audio path. I can turn up the audio to hear the chirps of the power regulators over the speakers; when the CPU is leaning on the PSU. Even just keystrokes in my editor cause a flurry of chirps as the clock-rate is increased and the systems races to idle within a few milliseconds. When a process stalls I would already know whether it's IO or computation. Depending on the chirping I may reach for either ping or top to investigate further. Sometimes I leave these chirps on for hours. It's nonintrusive feedback to me about background tasks and when they clear. I actually worry that my next machine will not have this flaw. And now I'm thinking of a syscall-chirp generator to get an even better feel for the pulse of the machine :-)
- swirepe 6y ago>And now I'm thinking of a syscall-chirp generator to get an even better feel for the pulse of the machine :-) Nullsoft (the winamp people) made something like this back in the day. I encourage you you to write your own :)
- kristianp 6y agoAre you using a mobile processor to keep the thermals down? Or underclocking a desktop-class processor and using a giant heat sink?
- elric 6y agoUnderclocking and undervolting CPUs has been a mainstay of silent computing. AMD's Duron platform was excellent for this. Not suitable for gaming, but fine for daily computing. Big heat sinks with heat pipes work pretty well. Big, slow fans when there's no way around them. Plastic rivets instead of screws and rubber washers manage to keep vibration noise down (fans, spinning disks).
- FpUser 6y ago>"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.
- int_19h 6y agoThere are massive aluminum cases for Pi 4 that turn the whole thing into a giant heat sink. They work, but they aren't exactly cheap; and they still heat up a lot. https://wickedaluminum.com/ https://wickedaluminum.com/
- m463 6y agoI beg to differ: https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case
- Scoundreller 6y agoWhat I don’t understand is why the external surface is flat. Even worse, they polished them to a mirror-like finish! You want to maximize surface area to radiate heat. Ideally they’d be rippled like a regular heat sink. Edit: also standoffs! Don’t undervalue how much heat you can expel from the underside.
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoSomething like this? https://www.coolipi.com/ https://www.coolipi.com/
- postalrat 6y agohttps://desalvoinc.com/products/maker-block-case-for-raspberry-pi-4 https://desalvoinc.com/products/maker-block-case-for-raspber... https://desalvoinc.com/products/housing-for-raspberry-pi-model-4b https://desalvoinc.com/products/housing-for-raspberry-pi-mod... They offer one with a flatish top and one with hexes. I bought the flat because I think it looks better. I there is much difference in cooling because in either case you will have a lot more cooling surface than the processor without a heatsink.
- m3at 6y agoAs this is sufficient to cool down the pi even at max load, I assume they considered the esthetic next
- 6y ago
- dragonwriter 6y ago> The surface area of the blades is barely larger than that of the motor. It looks like about 2.5cm blade vs. 1.5cm motor diameter, which is around 2.75× the area.
- p1mrx 6y agoEnclosing the fan in plastic with no vents should help keep the noise down, though it makes little sense from a thermal perspective.
- starky 6y agoTiny fans aren't necessarily whiny, but the quiet fans generally don't push a ton of air. My RPi4 has a Noctua 40mm x 20mm fan that is inaudible from more than a couple feet away. Sure, it would be fairly easy to design a die cast housing to cool the RPi silently, and the part cost would be about the same as a fan, but the tooling costs are going to be fairly high for a product that really won't sell a ton of units.
- cheaprentalyeti 6y agoLook up 'raspberry pi 4 heat sink case' and you'll find that a couple companies have already made these.
- milkey_mouse 6y agoNot all tiny fans are loud. I built a very quiet Raspberry Pi IP camera[1] actively cooled by a little Noctua fan[2], and it's so quiet I can't hear it when I put my ear up next to it (as you'd expect from a fan that costs almost $1 per cubic centimeter). [1]: https://github.com/milkey-mouse/basket/tree/master/hw/case https://github.com/milkey-mouse/basket/tree/master/hw/case [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NEMGCIA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NEMGCIA