I don't think you have to go deaf. Off the shelf, the Apple cube is very
quiet. Any sufficiently standard generic PC can be tweaked by reducing the
fan speeds, opting for modern, quieter, IDE drives, and spinning the drive
down (hdparm on Linux, there are Windows and Mac equivalents) when it's not
in use.
The big thing to avoid is beating (constructive interference) between the
power supply and the CPU fans (and case fans if you are a case fan fan).
I tend to put ten-turn trim pots in series with fans, just on general
principles.
If you don't need mega-performance in your bedside machine, you can use
socket-7 Pentiums with just convection cooling, aided by the PS fan. I used
to run a DEC Multia that way as my gateway.
The IBM Intellistations are a good example of something that comes off the
shelf with good if not great sonic behavior. It's clearly intended to be
used by brain-workers in quiet offices. Mine is a Dual PII, and I used to
run it 24/7 in a corner of my bedroom, but the power draw and the thermal
output are a bit much for that.
My next bedside machine will probably be a cube, since I'm already doing
PowerPC Linux on this laptop. I want to see a blowout sale on all the cubes
that Apple repurchased from CompUSA.
Eirikur
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:25:30 PDT