BYU Project to Silence Computer Fans

phunster writes "The New York Times has an article about Scott D. Sommerfeldt and his students at BYU who have created a noise suppression system for computer fans (drop of human blood required to read article). The technology is not new, he uses out of phase sound to substantially cancel out the sound of the fan. What is interesting is his implementation of the technique. While other systems place a microphone and speakers in the center of a room, he places four miniature speakers and microphones around the noise source itself. His results are promising."

Silent fans are a BAD thing

[Lehk228]

If the fans inside your CPU are silent you wouldn't notice if one failed, my machine is fairly quiet but i would notice if it booted without the CPU or PSU fan running.

How about an effective one!

[superpulpsicle]

I don't think this industry has come remotely close to making a fan that works. It's sad when people need tubes running to the bathroom just to keep the GPU or CPU cool.

If you create a fan that doesn't need water and guarantees performance of a water cooler, I think it'd be a hit. I have never the gotten blue screen of death from a noisy fan. Look on any forum, people are not complaining about noise. People are whining about overheating...

It's not the noise made by the fans...

[zepmaid]

Personally its them damn harddisks that piss me off.
If only someone could suppress the disk noise..

Yes, much simpler than..

[schon]

Yeah, this is much simpler than just making the fans quiet in the first place, right?

Wonderful. "Look, instead of paying an extra 50 cents for a higher quality quiet fan, you can use cheap fans and spend $25.00 in additional parts to make the computer quiet!"

*sigh*

Four microphones and speakers per fan??

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much electricity does this suck up, exactly?

Re:Yes, much simpler than..

[ShavenYak]

Or better yet, just design a machine that doesn't need fans at all. Honestly, the vast majority of home and office computer users could easily get by with a Via Eden chip, which can be passively cooled. Saves electricity too - the noisy fan is not the only problem with a CPU that draws 80 watts or whatever they're up to now.