Via Newsome, an article about a new case that specializes in keeping PCs quiet:

I ran into no problems or glitches moving the guts of the computer into the new case. The whole process took me less than an hour. When I was done, I reconnected all the cables to the rebuilt machine, plugged in the power cord and hit the On button.

And I could barely hear a thing.

At first, I thought something was wrong, because there almost was no sound to be heard from the PC. I could see the blue power indicator on the front, and my monitors showed the bootup process proceeding, but there was almost no fan sound at all.

I’ve been doing some computer building lately, and I know what Silverman means about thinking something was wrong. Other than monitor-output, which seems to take a few seconds, the only ways I know the computer are on are the LEDs and that the fan is running. But I can’t hear the fan, only see it. And this is in an open case!

Loud computers have been a bane on me for a while now. Mostly because Clancy is not as hard-of-hearing as I am and she notices these things far more than I do and I want to keep things quiet for her. Even so, she has pointed out the noise and it’s oddly started bothering me more since. I actually replaced the computer hooked up to the television with a laptop primarily (though not solely) for noise. I replaced the fan first and the new fan was quiet for all of two days before it started making the same racket. Not long afterwards, though, the laptop started getting loud. Now I am using a different laptop.

It seems that on the whole, fans have gotten a lot better than they used to be. I couldn’t find a quiet fan for my (2001) PCs, but all of the (CPU) fans on my new computers seem quiet. This came as quite a surprise as they sort of make a racket. I have since discovered that the offender is the little tiny fan on my video cards. Both of them! They make 100x more sound than any of my PC or case fans do. You can unplug the fan on these video cards, but they respond with reduced functionality (most inconveniently, at the moment, no multi-monitor). The entire notion that video cards should have their own fan is surprising to me, but it does seem that’s where a lot of the heat is generated these days. I know on some of my louder laptops, it’s the GPU’s (graphic processor unit) temperature and not the CPU’s that is causing the fan to go into overdrive.

I made sure that my new video card was fan-free. I would rather be able to buy my own case fans and whatnot to try to keep it cool. And I don’t really game, so I don’t need a particularly good video card (not sure what I’m going to do when-if I next want to capture video, though). This is complicated a bit by the fact that our computer room is hot, hot, hot. The previously mentioned laptop (a 2003 model) that was too loud in the living room in Cascadia apparently kicks into a racket-making overdrive in this room even when the computer isn’t doing much.

The case that Silverman got cost somewhere near $100, which as far as a specialty case goes isn’t all that bad. My large cases for housing lots of hard drives cost $80, though it did include a decent power supply. But it seems to me that with the necessity of increased speed and dexterity mattering less and less, quality-of-life issues like sound ought to be getting more attention and they should be making fans quieter (rather than having to have better insulation). The good news is that if my new PCs are any indication, they are.