News Is It On? Building Silent PCs

From Wired:

SEATTLE -- Finding it harder to concentrate at your desk? Maybe it's the constant drone of your personal computer.

A small but growing niche of users fed up with office noise pollution are turning to very quiet PCs to take back the sound of computing silence.

While the first computers, especially those that used punch cards, made a racket, the advent of microchips and standardized components helped make computers silent and small enough to put on every desk.

But recently, PCs have started to become noisier again as they become more powerful.

That's because faster chips, which need to cope with increasingly complex software, generate more heat, which in turn needs to be dissipated with fans, heat pipes and vents, making computers sound more like mini-power plants.

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