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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Why would a ZERO rpm fan cause interference ?

"Regardless of what is desired in theory, a small box like the Mini with a 15W cpu needs a running fan for safety."

It's not a matter of safety, because if it were, there would be danger in the case the fan fails. There is (or should be) thermal management firmware and/or hardware to control power consumption. This can be done by underclocking, undervolting, shutting down redundant cores, etc...


I suggest looking at the power consumption of the device while it is idling. You will find that it may be very little. This can be easily done if one has access to the power source, e.g. using a device such as Kill-A-Watt to monitor power usage. (This won't work with battery powered devices such as tablets.) CMOS logic uses very little power when no signals are changing, such as when the system is idle. Even while playing music if there is no DSP involved CPU utilization will be a few percent and even when CPU utilization is higher much of the processor hardware will be idle (e.g. floating point vector processing, graphics processing). Obviously this depends on software.

My new Asus Transformer notebook/tablet runs windows 8.1 and has no fan. It runs at room temperature while reading PDFs or surfing the web. The only time it is warm is while charging the battery or playing video.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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