We tolerate way too much noise in our daily lives, especially in dense cities. It’s a hidden tax on our health. Constant low-level noise has been linked to stress, sleep disruption, and even cardiovascular issues.
What bothers me is that we only regulate the loudest offenders (cars, motorcycles, construction), while the residual of everything else is just accepted as background. But that background adds up.
I wish we had stricter regulations not only for peak noise but also for the residual noise emitted by everyday objects. If reducing a few decibels here and there became a design goal across the board, the cumulative effect on quality of life in cities would be enormous.
Some years ago I had my first panic attack at work. Walking home was an atrocity; and since then I'm much more aware of how noisy a city can be.
Now I have a kid I often walk around. You're even more sensitive to city noises when you're desperately trying to keep your baby asleep!
The two big offenders where we live are a) drunk students partying outside; b) motorcycles (which are somehow allowed to be this noisy?). It's a pedestrian-focused city mostly car-free, but motorcycles and young drunkards more than compensate.
Another source of annoyance are the beeps and boops that every household appliance thinks they need to have. The microwave's song when it finishes, the water boiler's super loud beep, the washing machine's stupid jingle at start and end of a cycle, etc.
Going to Shanghai (FFC) and seeing a bus driver flashing headlights instead of honking at a green light laggard was eye opening. All the electric cars and mopeds too of course.
Coming back to NYC afterwards was wild. The fucking food stand generators. AC vents. The cars. The buses.
We don't even do a good enough job at regulating peak noise. There are asshats who have anti theft alarms on their cars that go off for what feels like hours and they don't stop by to check on their cars. Also there are idiots who deliberately destroy the silencers or mufflers on their bikes. I think these things are a higher priority.
My brother's car/camping fridge's compressor fan died. He replaced it with a Noctua. It's 1/3rd the volume and actually has slightly MORE airlow than the 20c 90mm fan that was ziptied to it from the factory.
I bought some custom molded earplugs recently and I got 3 sets - two are completely sealed off and are very nice for when I wish for peace and quiet and don’t need to hear or speak.
I also use noise canceling mode on my airpods pro quite often.
The advantage is that it works even when I’m in an environment I can’t control, like an airport or waiting room.
There are special brackets for mounting HDDs, where there are rubber rings interposed between the mounting screws and the bracket, in order to prevent the transmission of the HDD vibrations to the chassis, which usually greatly amplifies the HDD noise.
With such brackets the noise is usually reduced a lot. There are some computer cases that are advertised as silent cases and which include such brackets by default (e.g. from Fractal Design).
It's probably coupling the vibration into whatever shelf it's sitting on, which then transduces it to the air. Set the unit on some foam, it helps a lot.
That's a very cool hack, but there are tons of things on a system that aren't the CPU that would benefit from some moving air. A fan somewhere in the system that just moves a bit of air would, I think, really contribute to the overall longevity.
I have a 3D printer I bought a few years ago and I keep it in my office. It was quite loud as is and I sent through the process of quieting it down. Fans were a big part of it. It has four of them: power supply, main board, and two on the hot end/extruder. Noctua was what was mostly recommended, but (a) price and (b) at the time I believe they mostly or only had 12 volt fans and this printer ran on 24V so each fan would need a voltage converter board.
Well turns out you can get quieter and cheaper fans on e.g. Mouser or Newark that are 24V compatible. They let you sort and filter by size, voltage, noise level, and volume per minute so I found the quietest possible fans that still move roughly the same volume of air as the stock ones. The price was half to a quarter of equivalent Noctua fans (excluding converters) at that time.
From what I hear (pun intended) Noctua makes a great product both functionally and aesthetically, but don’t overlook industrial suppliers either.
Did you also stat out the static pressure? It's an important factor I don't see you mention and a lot of people over look it. It's especially important on some of those fans because the ducting and cooling they're pushing has restrictions and need a fair amount of static pressure to maintain the rated CF/M. Quieter fans generally have a lower static pressure rating too so you might not be getting the CFM you think for fans like the part cooling fan that has to push the air through the ducting around the head.
I don’t remember if I did but I can tell you that the performance I am getting from them is more than adequate. Cooling has not been an issue at all which I can measure and continuously monitor for some of these with the printer’s built in sensors. Basically for something like this use case the point isn’t to make it as cool as possible but cool enough to work correctly which these fans are more than able to do all day long at a volume level that is inaudible to me.
>From what I hear (pun intended) Noctua makes a great product both functionally and aesthetically
Can confirm. I was unaware of the large difference in different fans that weren't priced far apart previous to a Noctua recommendation. After hearing them in situ beside some other brands it is incredible the difference in sound. I strictly use them on my homelab and the spinning hard-drives make more noise than the fans.
This isn't a problem. The article says that this is only if you're looking to trade-off performance for less noise:
> In other words, we would only recommend upgrading to the NF-A12x25 G2 if you seek to lower noise levels as much as possible and if you are willing to sacrifice the maximum performance headroom in worst-case scenarios that the G1 HS-PWM fan provides.
> In addition to redesigning and testing the Noctua fan grill, we also evaluated various other scenarios. These included replacing the NF-A12x25 with its G2 variant and incorporating an additional 8cm fan for exhaust purposes.
> It seems pretty bad to need to print your own grill when Noctua collaborated on the project.
not really, like if that would be seen as bad in general then the only solution would be to keep it a secret that they "collaborated" on it
like giving you employees a bit of time to work on product related passion projects, which might even cross company boundaries and can be used in a PR context is one thing. And a good example for it is software companies reserving some time of employees to work on OSS (in a context where OSS contributions go beyond what the company needs). It boost employee moral, is positive PR, let people learn/train their skills etc.
but going from there to a product they sell is a HUGE step, like far larger then it seems
like the cost between the tinkerer project from the article and turning it into a product is more like a x-times multipler then some two digit % increase.
a good example is a previous collaboration where for a 3d printed casing for the framework 13 motherboard, where due to high demand they then decided to produce it
but for production lines you now need to meet higher quality standard and 3d printing often isn't an option, so no it needs 2 molds and in addition the screw now need to have proper stable/metal thingies you screw them into in-layed into the mold. And you need to have QA, production line inspections etc. Idk. if they made money or a loss or neutral on it but at least from a QA perspective they got burned as many of the casings had quality issues where you needed to fix them with a sharp knife or they wouldn't close properly
now companies have 3 choices
- not allow such passion projects, which sucks for everyone
- allows them, but keep them secret, which still sucks for most
- rebrand it as "some vision prototype", "experimental change to the form factor" or similar (which is what many other tech companies do), now most people are happy except the tinkerers which could just print it, let it be printed with a 3d printing service
- allow them, show them, and make most people happy except the small amount of people which really want it, aren't fine with any tinkering and blame the company for showing something nice which might not make sense to sell as a product
and in that context I really prefer it the way Framework and Noctua tend to do it
Nocuta is a case study in how to make a high quality and luxury product to dominate a seemly small market. In a seemingly commoditized market where fans can be had for $3-$4 Nocuta still demands and get's $30-$40 dollars.
I don't think they dominate. Noctua used to be the best, but current reputation as far as I've seen is that the performance isn't necessarily better than the competition. You buy them for durability and supporting the engineering, but most (not some/fringe) DIY builders choose a cheaper brand.
It's a bit more pronounced in CPU cooling towers, they are solid blocks where durability doesn't play a role. Noctua is good but the top performer and market leader is Thermalright which costs a third of Noctua.
Noctua also provides free new mounts. I've had the same NH-D12 for over a decade now and whenever I switch CPU socket they send me a new mount for free.
Fair, but sort of my point. Make a extraordinary superior product in a very niche market and educated consumers will pay. Sure, there will always be uneducated or just "frugal" or cheap consumers but they are the fringe. Example are luxury brands such as Mercedes or Rolex. A hot take, but can't be denied as well Apple.
Not sure I agree here. Yes, maybe it's 10x the price (which I doubt in the first place) it's actually performing very well, measurably.
I don't know how you benchmark a Rolex vs a Seiko for 500 bucks. That is luxury to me. And yet it is perfectly fine to argue a Casio for 10-20 bucks performs just as well.
With the all-flat layout of the Ryzen APU and soldered memory I always though the framework desktop MB would be ideal for a single waterblock covering the entire MB.
Its really cool how, despite the core chip at the heart of the Framework Desktop not being that extensible, Framework went out of their way to make the FD as extensible and modular as possible, and are fostering a community of 3D printing stuff around it.
Readit News
Like I’d love for them to make my HVAC system quieter.
Or table fans. Or car air conditioners.
Just about every fan in my life would be better if Noctua redesigned it.
They’d be like Dolby, but for making LESS noise.
What bothers me is that we only regulate the loudest offenders (cars, motorcycles, construction), while the residual of everything else is just accepted as background. But that background adds up.
I wish we had stricter regulations not only for peak noise but also for the residual noise emitted by everyday objects. If reducing a few decibels here and there became a design goal across the board, the cumulative effect on quality of life in cities would be enormous.
Now I have a kid I often walk around. You're even more sensitive to city noises when you're desperately trying to keep your baby asleep!
The two big offenders where we live are a) drunk students partying outside; b) motorcycles (which are somehow allowed to be this noisy?). It's a pedestrian-focused city mostly car-free, but motorcycles and young drunkards more than compensate.
Another source of annoyance are the beeps and boops that every household appliance thinks they need to have. The microwave's song when it finishes, the water boiler's super loud beep, the washing machine's stupid jingle at start and end of a cycle, etc.
Coming back to NYC afterwards was wild. The fucking food stand generators. AC vents. The cars. The buses.
By now HN should have a bot to automatically post the above quote in every new thread created, because someone will always make that comment.
There are very quiet places you can move to, so quiet that you can hear your own blood vessels.
I also use noise canceling mode on my airpods pro quite often.
The advantage is that it works even when I’m in an environment I can’t control, like an airport or waiting room.
I’ve relegated the Synology to the basement. I can still hear it grinding at night.
With such brackets the noise is usually reduced a lot. There are some computer cases that are advertised as silent cases and which include such brackets by default (e.g. from Fractal Design).
Dead Comment
https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/monochrome-2-my-cu...
His trick is to use a number of heat pipes (that transfer the heat through vaporization), and a really really big heat sink (a 5kg copper plate).
Well turns out you can get quieter and cheaper fans on e.g. Mouser or Newark that are 24V compatible. They let you sort and filter by size, voltage, noise level, and volume per minute so I found the quietest possible fans that still move roughly the same volume of air as the stock ones. The price was half to a quarter of equivalent Noctua fans (excluding converters) at that time.
From what I hear (pun intended) Noctua makes a great product both functionally and aesthetically, but don’t overlook industrial suppliers either.
Can confirm. I was unaware of the large difference in different fans that weren't priced far apart previous to a Noctua recommendation. After hearing them in situ beside some other brands it is incredible the difference in sound. I strictly use them on my homelab and the spinning hard-drives make more noise than the fans.
> In other words, we would only recommend upgrading to the NF-A12x25 G2 if you seek to lower noise levels as much as possible and if you are willing to sacrifice the maximum performance headroom in worst-case scenarios that the G1 HS-PWM fan provides.
> In addition to redesigning and testing the Noctua fan grill, we also evaluated various other scenarios. These included replacing the NF-A12x25 with its G2 variant and incorporating an additional 8cm fan for exhaust purposes.
not really, like if that would be seen as bad in general then the only solution would be to keep it a secret that they "collaborated" on it
like giving you employees a bit of time to work on product related passion projects, which might even cross company boundaries and can be used in a PR context is one thing. And a good example for it is software companies reserving some time of employees to work on OSS (in a context where OSS contributions go beyond what the company needs). It boost employee moral, is positive PR, let people learn/train their skills etc.
but going from there to a product they sell is a HUGE step, like far larger then it seems
like the cost between the tinkerer project from the article and turning it into a product is more like a x-times multipler then some two digit % increase.
a good example is a previous collaboration where for a 3d printed casing for the framework 13 motherboard, where due to high demand they then decided to produce it
but for production lines you now need to meet higher quality standard and 3d printing often isn't an option, so no it needs 2 molds and in addition the screw now need to have proper stable/metal thingies you screw them into in-layed into the mold. And you need to have QA, production line inspections etc. Idk. if they made money or a loss or neutral on it but at least from a QA perspective they got burned as many of the casings had quality issues where you needed to fix them with a sharp knife or they wouldn't close properly
now companies have 3 choices
- not allow such passion projects, which sucks for everyone
- allows them, but keep them secret, which still sucks for most
- rebrand it as "some vision prototype", "experimental change to the form factor" or similar (which is what many other tech companies do), now most people are happy except the tinkerers which could just print it, let it be printed with a 3d printing service
- allow them, show them, and make most people happy except the small amount of people which really want it, aren't fine with any tinkering and blame the company for showing something nice which might not make sense to sell as a product
and in that context I really prefer it the way Framework and Noctua tend to do it
Deleted Comment
Appears that it doesn't pass safety guidelines, so this is one way to get around that.
It's a bit more pronounced in CPU cooling towers, they are solid blocks where durability doesn't play a role. Noctua is good but the top performer and market leader is Thermalright which costs a third of Noctua.
Cheap Chinese clones eventually arrive when a successfully company dominates a market.
It does not mean that they no longer dominate.
All I had to do was send them the receipt for the cooler.
I don't know how you benchmark a Rolex vs a Seiko for 500 bucks. That is luxury to me. And yet it is perfectly fine to argue a Casio for 10-20 bucks performs just as well.