A quiet notebook

[Grisu]

CFC, I need your help

there's the situation. about a year ago I bought a new notebook as desktop replacement. It's a HP Pavillon DV7, with a i7-750qm cpu with a ati hd 5650 gpu, 8gigs of RAM. I'm happy with its performance but I'm mightily annoyed by the noise.

I often use the notebook in the living room in the evenings (since I have no desire to sit alone in the home office once the kids are in bed). But even at light-load tasks such as browsing the internet, the fan usually picks up a stage or two (with only about 4-5% total load).

so I decided to look for another notebook...it doesn't even have to be as powerful as this, it just should be able to run games such as eu3 or vicky2 more or less smoothly (any game is more or less unplayable because the noise gets so annoying when the fan turns up to full power).

The problem is, how do I determine if a notebook will be quieter without testing it for a day or so? do i3/i5 generate considerably less heat? any ideas for finding a quieter model?

 

[tokala]

any ideas for finding a quieter model?

Looking for a quiet notebook for gaming is going to get somehow difficult. It's impossible to know beforehand how noisy it will get during gaming.
Generally a larger chassis, dual core CPU and a low powered GPU is what you are looking for. Best thing is to look for reviews in magazines and online.

For example the packard bell easynote ts11hr gets noted as being relatively quiet for a decently performing notebook both in C't magazine and on notebookcheck.com.
As long as you only play games with really low 3D requirements (like those Paradox titles) a model with a i3 and a GT520 should be sufficient and will almost certainly stay very quiet.
A model with a i5 and a GT540 should still be pretty quiet while providing about 40% more CPU and about 100% more GPU performance.

 

[Grisu]

thanks for that link. I'll have to look through my archived C't mags, maybe I find something there. my main problem seems to be that a lot of reviews seem to ignore fan noise. or when they do they only quantify it in words "the fan noise remains at an acceptable level" ....what is acceptable?

notebookcheck seems to be the only site that often does measure the noise.

as I said, I'm not really looking for a gaming laptop, I have no interest in FPS or any of the really high requirement games...What I want most is that it remains silent (or almost silent) under light load (such as webbrowsing)

 

[GenMarshall]

Not sure if this would help, but you could invest in a cooling pad that is powered via USB. The fans are wisper quiet.

 

[Mise]

You could always buy a tablet computer, e.g. iPad, Motorla Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc. That will be perfectly adequate for web browsing, wafer thin, light, and silent.

Your notebook's motherboard/CPU might have drivers and tools that will underclock your CPU to make it run cooler, and to change settings on the fan and stuff. You might want to look at the CD/drivers/tools that came with your notebook to see if there's anything you can do there.

I'd expect most notebooks on the market today to play EU3 and Vicky 2 just fine.

 

[tokala]

thanks for that link. I'll have to look through my archived C't mags, maybe I find something there.

The review I was referring to was in issue 10/2011, and it gets 0.1 sone while idling, which should qualify as "noiseless" in anything but an extremely quiet surrounding, and 0.7 sone under load, which gets labeled as "very quiet" by the strict standards of C't magazine. And that is with the "high end" equipment variant, i.e. quad core and GT540m.

If no 3d application is active, modern notebooks with a dedicated nVidia GPU will switch to the integrated intel graphics, so it would not matter for office/web tasks if you have a seperate GPU or not.

 

[mdwh]

On the topic of additional devices just for browsing, my Samsung N220 netbook is completely silent - cheaper than a tablet, and still gives you a full computer.

 

[Grisu]

You could always buy a tablet computer, e.g. iPad, Motorla Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc. That will be perfectly adequate for web browsing, wafer thin, light, and silent.

...but I'd miss the keyboard, I imagine posting on boards would be rather tedious...and then there's my irrational hatred of anything apple

Your notebook's motherboard/CPU might have drivers and tools that will underclock your CPU to make it run cooler, and to change settings on the fan and stuff. You might want to look at the CD/drivers/tools that came with your notebook to see if there's anything you can do there.

apparently, there's a BIOS setting "Fan always on" that defaults to true...turning it off does nothing really other than the notebook being a bit quieter during boot (big deal)...after that, the fan kicks in as before.

The review I was referring to was in issue 10/2011, and it gets 0.1 sone while idling, which should qualify as "noiseless" in anything but an extremely quiet surrounding, and 0.7 sone under load, which gets labeled as "very quiet" by the strict standards of C't magazine. And that is with the "high end" equipment variant, i.e. quad core and GT540m.

0.1-0.7 sone indeed does sound rather quiet...I'll have to check it out...now I only have to find a german vendor that delivers to Switzerland...the Swiss vendors all seem to refuse to acknowledge that the Euro has fallen far....the same notebooks costs about 1.5 times what it costs in germany...

If no 3d application is active, modern notebooks with a dedicated nVidia GPU will switch to the integrated intel graphics, so it would not matter for office/web tasks if you have a seperate GPU or not.

I thought my notebook had that already, but it turns out I confused CUDA with Optimus

On the topic of additional devices just for browsing, my Samsung N220 netbook is completely silent - cheaper than a tablet, and still gives you a full computer.

That's a option worth considering, I'd still have a full keyboard to type.....would still need my 'old' notebook for gaming then...

 

[Grisu]

as a update, I partially heeded tokala's advice and got a Packard Bell notebook, but I got the 17'' version (LS11HR) that got good reviews regarding noise as well. so far I'm very happy with it, performance is similar to the old notebook but without the noise. and it had refreshingly little crap pre-installed (unlike my HP *shudders*)