Wow this Dell is QUIET...

well i offered to fix a work buddy's comp for him... and it's a dell (really... bad... system.) 1.8GHz P4, 256megs ram... a budget system.

i plugged it into my CRT (no DVI), and my PS/2 keyboard and mouse (no USB support on boot-up) and powered it on... at least i think i did.

i see a flashing light on the cd drive, but no sound. wtf?!? then i see the monitor click on and windows is booting up. ?!?

i can not hear a single fan, hard drive, ANYTHING coming out of this system!

i SEE fans, and it looks like theyre spinning, but they are making NO noise.

aside from the spyware, kazaa, etc etc he had on it (he needed it to run faster / smoother, etc) the thing's pretty decent, at least for what he needs it for).

i might not like Dell for the amount of crap they put on their retail systems, but i gotta give it to them this time - they can make one QUIET-arse system!

There are quite a few people here at this site that don't overclock at all, theres a good percentage of people that just want a blazing fast, quiet pc. You can find ways of building a system far better than a Dell here and make it 'Dell quiet' to boot.

I will also give them credit for that, and they do make great systems for people who are just casual PC users. They are a great system to have out in the family room or somewhere you don't want a vacume

My Dell Laptop is silent as well, don't even hear the hard drive and the fan come on like once every 10 mins while watching a DVD, then its off after about a min, but evne when its on you can barely notice it over the sound of the movie.

JDXNC said:

I will also give them credit for that, and they do make great systems for people who are just casual PC users. They are a great system to have out in the family room or somewhere you don't want a vacume

My Dell Laptop is silent as well, don't even hear the hard drive and the fan come on like once every 10 mins while watching a DVD, then its off after about a min, but evne when its on you can barely notice it over the sound of the movie.

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I have a family friend that had a really really quiet Dell system that used to crash after about 30 minutes of use. The 'great' Dell service sucks if you ask me. They spent weeks talking to Dell customer support trying to get them to fix the system over the phone, for whatever reason they did not send a Dell tech to them, I was there for dinner one night, they told me their plight, I opened the case and discovered the Cpu fan was not plugged in

Silversinksam said:

I opened the case and discovered the Cpu fan was not plugged in

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Lovely

Thats what happens with mass production, it happens everywhere. The company I work for makes stretch wrapping machines and a few years back we got bought out by a company in Greece(the European leader in the industry at that), they sent over a few of thier machines and it was amazing the crap that they shipped out, pieces missing, broken pieces installed.... it goes on. Sadly with a push for higher production rates from the parent Co. this is starting to happen here as well

Well my laptop was my first system from Dell and I'm happy with it, I'm sure there's been plenty of other who are not. I haven't had a problem with it yet, so I can't say how thier customer support is. The only thing I was not satisfied with it was the load of crap software they put on it.... taken care of that, but thats also pretty much to be expected of any OEM.

JDXNC said:

Lovely

Thats what happens with mass production, it happens everywhere. The company I work for makes stretch wrapping machines and a few years back we got bought out by a company in Greece(the European leader in the industry at that), they sent over a few of thier machines and it was amazing the crap that they shipped out, pieces missing, broken pieces installed.... it goes on. Sadly with a push for higher production rates from the parent Co. this is starting to happen here as well

Well my laptop was my first system from Dell and I'm happy with it, I'm sure there's been plenty of other who are not.

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It's like anything else, in the past I have purchased new sealed retail videocards with no thermal paste between the heatsink and GPU core, lesson learned is to always look if there is paste even at the risk of voiding the warranty.

Silversinksam said:

It's like anything else, in the past I have purchased new sealed retail videocards with no thermal paste between the heatsink and GPU core, lesson learned is to always look if there is paste even at the risk of voiding the warranty.

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Thats it, just gotta be oin the lookout, even when buying something new from a reputable company. I know at work I pride myself in quality workmanship, but I cannot say the same for others. I've been to a few shops in our industry and I can say Quality Control is by far largly a joke. It all pretty much comes down to the luck of the draw on anything.

They achieve this through slower hardrives (5400rpm usually), slow fans in ducts, large heatsinks connected to the ducts.

Dell does make really quiet systems. whole point they don't oc as well but i would like our school to have 50 computers with 3x 220cfm deltas in each and an xp90c. hell it would be worse than an airport and we would blow out our ear drums but it's a fair trade for x2 3800+ running above 2.9ghz lol

-1cem4n

I will give them credit for quietness - then on top of that prably a company with the MOST returns of overheated hardware


they are quiet cause they dont have good enough cooling. - or so was the case in the past.