Cooling requirements, chassis design, and fan noise

摘要

The noise of cooling fans is strongly influenced by thermal considerations and chassis designfeatures, which may be cast in stone long before noise emission is considered. Fan scaling lawsare combined with fundamental engineering equations to highlight the interplay between thecompeting requirements. The resulting relationship can be used to motivate early attention tonoise emission issues. By way of example, a variant of Moore's Law related to processor heatoutput is used to predict a rather sobering future noise emission trend.