Funny/scary anecdote: I have a PC whose CPU fan has stopped working about 18 months ago. The thing has been running as my home server, reliably, and it is very stable.
Of course, the fan sits on top of a huge heat-spreader, which still (passively) works, and the case is open, and the machine has not all that much to do serving me. On hot summer days, the system log tells me frequently that the CPU has throttled itself to prevent overheating, but that's about it. And that's Core2 Quad, so it has not been exactly engineered for this scenario. And still, to my utter surprise, this thing runs along merrily, with an uptime of currently 148 days.
If I can create a "fanless"[1] computer by accident that works and is - in face of the rather modest load I put on it - rock-solid stable, building one intentionally should not be that hard.
I own two notebooks, for Pete's sake, that are fanless, and they work well.
So, yes, the idea that a computer must make some kind of noise to show you it is working is gradually becoming a thing of the past. If sufficient cooling can be achieved without moving parts, that is preferable.
OTOH, the sounds devices emit used to be indicators of what was going on inside them. With SSDs, you can no longer hear your hard drive work. When I sit at one of our CAD workstations and watch a designer model something in Autodesk Inventor, more and more fans are spinning faster and faster as the temperature rises - the noise level correlates to the workload of the system.
If the computer becomes absolutely silent, we need substitutes for those metrics. Blinkenlights, maybe.
[1] Strictly speaking, the power supply still has a fan, and that one is not all that far away from the CPU, which might improve the situation somewhat.
I believe a lot of fans in modern systems are for worse case rather than average case situations.
As far as I know, there's nothing in the Dell et al. warranty that prohibits you from running a high-load system in a confined nook in a dust-clogged room with a high ambient temperature. So cooling needs to be designed to be sufficient even in pathologically stupid situations.
> If the computer becomes absolutely silent, we need substitutes for those metrics. Blinkenlights, maybe.
At least once a month, I notice my MacbookPro (with the silent fan) going very loud, I investigate, kill the offending process (usually Chrome or something from Adobe) and continue with my life.
On the other hand that fan is the only thing that can break,
and replacing it is probably expensive, so I have mixed feelings about passive cooling.
Perhaps the new keyboard-screen-bar-thing can be programmed to show system load.
Of course, the fan sits on top of a huge heat-spreader, which still (passively) works, and the case is open, and the machine has not all that much to do serving me. On hot summer days, the system log tells me frequently that the CPU has throttled itself to prevent overheating, but that's about it. And that's Core2 Quad, so it has not been exactly engineered for this scenario. And still, to my utter surprise, this thing runs along merrily, with an uptime of currently 148 days.
If I can create a "fanless"[1] computer by accident that works and is - in face of the rather modest load I put on it - rock-solid stable, building one intentionally should not be that hard.
I own two notebooks, for Pete's sake, that are fanless, and they work well.
So, yes, the idea that a computer must make some kind of noise to show you it is working is gradually becoming a thing of the past. If sufficient cooling can be achieved without moving parts, that is preferable.
OTOH, the sounds devices emit used to be indicators of what was going on inside them. With SSDs, you can no longer hear your hard drive work. When I sit at one of our CAD workstations and watch a designer model something in Autodesk Inventor, more and more fans are spinning faster and faster as the temperature rises - the noise level correlates to the workload of the system. If the computer becomes absolutely silent, we need substitutes for those metrics. Blinkenlights, maybe.
[1] Strictly speaking, the power supply still has a fan, and that one is not all that far away from the CPU, which might improve the situation somewhat.