alt Hacker News> Very loud high speed fans
if you haven't heard a 5u server intended for a datacenter rack come to life it's quite the experience. Sounds like a plane taking off.
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My workstations are usually tower servers, which are the same design as their 4 and 5u rack counterparts.
Until the thermal management kicks in, they sound like jet planes. When the thermal management starts and assesses the required cooling, it’ll throttle down the fans to reasonable levels.
That is, until the moment you push the machine to its limits. When then happens, you might get back to the same levels of the boot time, but it’ll require you to push everything to the max - CPU, memory, storage (all 24 bays) and so on. For a normal user, there is a lot of room and it’s virtually impossible, even with a dozen of Teams windows open.
"Sounds like a plane taking off."
Helicopter. I live in Yeovil, Somerset, UK - there's a helicopter factory just down the road. I had a IBM "AS/400" or whatever they are called now in our computer room rack for a customer and it made nearly as much noise as everything else put together. It was clearly tuned for start up noise to impress because they would fire up in sequence, rise to a crescendo and then slow down in sequence to just a din instead of painfully loud.
A switch or PC server on boot will normally run up cooling fans instantly to max as a default protection mechanism until the "OS" has started and sensors read and then the fans will slow down to deal with the actual thermal load.
If you switch off your air conn, it gets noisy, quickly. Recently in the UK we are seeing routine temperatures around 30C and we broke 200 odd year records for temperatures a few weeks back. I know its even worse elsewhere but our infrastructure is not designed for this. Here we are at the same latitude as Calgary AB!