Quiet PC
computer optimized to minimize noise produced
A quiet, silent or fanless PC is a personal computer that makes very little or no noise. Common uses for quiet PCs include video editing, sound mixing and home theater PCs, but noise reduction techniques can also be used to greatly reduce the noise from servers. There is currently no standard definition for a "quiet PC", and the term is generally not used in a business context, but by individuals and the businesses catering to them.
A proposed general definition is that the sound emitted by such PCs should not exceed 30 dBA, but in addition to the average sound pressure level, the frequency spectrum and dynamics of the sound are important in determining if the sound of the computer is noticed. Sounds with a smooth frequency spectrum (lacking audible tonal peaks), and little temporal variation are less likely to be noticed. The character and amount of other noise in the environment also affects how much sound will be noticed or masked, so a computer may be quiet in relation to a particular environment or set of users.
History
Energy Star, in 1992, and similar programs led to the widespread adoption of sleep mode among consumer electronics, and the TCO Certified program promoted lower energy consumption.
Causes of noise
The main causes of PC noise are:
Vibration from disk drives
Air vortex effects from fan blade edges
Electrical whine: noise generated by electrical coils or transformers used in power supplies, motherboards, video cards or LCD monitors.
Measuring noise
Though standards do exist for measuring and reporting sound power output by such things as computer components, they are often ignored. Many manufacturers do not give sound power measurements.
“Quiet PC” enters the record as computer optimized to minimize noise produced. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quiet, computer and optimized can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1191290. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quiet PC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.