Early adopters have included tech-savvy musicians and sound engineers, who can't afford to have a humming PC drown out the subtle aspects of the music they're making, said Michael Farnsworth, president of Quiet PC North America, the US branch of a British company and one of the first specialty retailers devoted to quiet computing equipment.
Lawyers have also turned out to be a good market, Farnsworth said. "Noise reduces your attention and ability to think," he said. "When you're worth $300 an hour, that's a big deal."
Interest in quiet computing has varied by region as well as occupation. Robert Jung, general manager of technology and business development for Zalman USA, said it's no accident the company that started the quiet-computing movement was launched in South Korea.
Zalman Tech founder Sang-Cheol Lee started the company to sell variations on the super-efficient heatsinks he developed to make his PC tolerably quiet. Zalman has gone on to provide quiet cooling systems for numerous other PC heat-spewers and is now looking at items such as plasma TVs and projectors. "Anything you can think of that creates heat, we're trying to provide a quiet, fanless solution for it," Jung said.
While most quiet-computing buffs start out with such practical goals, a small subset goes extreme, launching search-and-destroy missions for anything that clicks or wheezes in their PC. Forums on sites such as Chin's are full of impassioned debates about whether ceiling tiles or acoustic foam dampen more sound when glued into a PC case or the relative benefits of distilled water vs. diluted antifreeze for liquid cooling.
"For most people, the goal is just to get the PC down to the level of ambient noise in the room where they're using it," Chin said. "But some people have turned it into a hobby, where they obsess over every fine detail. It just becomes a game for them -- you take care of one thing, and then you can hear the next most annoying thing."
The most extreme experiment with "underclocking" and "undervolting", the polar opposite of techniques PC hot-rodders use to push chips past their normal speed limits.
Chin says "undervolting" -- adjusting a PC's setting so the processor receives less power than it's supposed to -- actually makes sense in a lot of cases where a PC isn't being pushed to its limits. "If you're playing games on the PC, then maybe you want every last little drop of performance," he said. "But for your average user, an incremental drop in performance just doesn't matter. And the payback is that the processor runs a lot cooler."
