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Quiet Your Xbox 360 DVD Drive
>> From extremetech.com:
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The most noticeable fault of the system, the one you'd be most likely to hear about from the largest number of users, is how loud it is. Sitting idly in the Dashboard system interface, the 360 isn't so bad: It's not whisper-quiet, but not annoying. Pop in a game, and it's a whole other story. When that DVD-ROM drive spins up to full 12x speed, it puts out a ton of noise. Fortunately, it spins slower when playing DVD movies, and the HD-DVD add-on drive is very quiet.
Our experiments with trying to bring down the noise level of a high-end system in an Antec Nine Hundred case got us thinking: Can we do anything about the 360's noise level? Specifically, can we reduce the sound output when the DVD drive spins up while playing a retail game? We've seen plenty of 360 mods around the 'net, most of them centered on making the case look cool or water-cooling the CPU and GPU inside. In our view, silencing or eliminating those rear exhaust fans is a moot point when the optical drive creates a lot more noise. So here, we'll take apart an Xbox 360 and show you a couple of simple tricks applied in an effort to bring down the noise level a bit, without dramatically hacking up the box.
Final Results--Worth the Effort?
And after the modifications? We managed to trim quite a bit of noise out, but it's still not exactly what you would call a "whisper quiet" system:
Idle (at dashboard): 48dB -> 44dB
Playing a DVD movie: 50dB -> 45dB
Playing a game (DVD drive spinning full speed): 60dB -> 56dB
That's a difference of 4dB to 5dB. Interestingly, the extra insulation seems to help reduce the system's noise at all times, even just idling at the dashboard with nothing in the DVD drive at all. In the logarithmic decibel scale, a difference of 3dB is literally half the sound pressure. That doesn't quite map to human perception, though, and a 3dB difference doesn't always sound "half as loud."
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Read More: extremetech.com (6 pages)
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