Whereas the Wii had an almost immeasurable sound output at rest or while playing around on the hard drive, the noise increase from the Wii once a game was loaded surprised me. The Wii started at a sound output of approximately 51 dB at rest and clocked in at a whopping 70 dB! This is almost a 20dB increase in sound output!
I wouldn’t have called 51 dB “immeasurable”, but 70 dB is loud. Is this guy way off the deep end? My 360 is bad enough.
I have noticed that the Wii sometimes gets really loud when playing games . It seems to be random for mine, one time it was loud while playing Zelda, other times I barely heard it.
Now that it’s been pointed out, I think it’s true. I’ve always complained about the jet-engine revving up for take-off loudness of my launch X360, but occasionally I notice the Wii and it startles me. The reason I don’t think I notice it as often is because I’m often leaping around like a fool, panting with exertion while playing it, so the sound of the disc spinning is rarely something of which I find I’m conscious.
It shouldn’t come as much surprise that the smallest console is the loudest, even if it’s also the least powerful. It still generates a lot of heat that needs to be dissipated over a smaller surface area than a 360 or PS3.
I’ve always had the sense the 360 is far louder than the Wii though I’ve never really measured them in a controlled manner. In either case, I tend to only notice the loudness of them when the sound changes. As long as the sound remains the same, I just tune them out, like an air conditioner.
This isn’t directly related, but the GC is very noisy when reading from its CD, much more so than my xbox. But the constant background ‘hum’ of the xbox makes it seem a louder console than the GC overall. When not reading from its CD the GC is silent.
Maybe Nintendo just has a noisy technology for their CD/DVD players?
I think people notice the 360 noise because your drive will be running at 12 X during loading, and loading screens don’t have much noise to distract you.
However when pushing the CPU and GPU, you are also going to have lots of in game sounds distracting you.
Since the fans scale to work load, and the drive is scaled to read load, and work = interactive distraction, it would create a cognitive bias, no?
That’s a great theory, considering that it has nothing to do with any facts!
Overlooking the humorous goof of the article talking about the Wii’s “hard drive” (it has solid-state memory), it correctly reports that the Wii’s optical disk drive makes a lot of noise but the console is otherwise fairly quiet. The fan will eventually spin faster as the console heats up during extended play, but it still isn’t very loud. I don’t have a 360 or PS3 for comparison but the fan of my old PS2 was much louder, and the Gamecube was pretty much the same as the Wii.
I don’t have a wii or ps3 to compare it too but I totally agree with this. For all the complaints people make about the noise from the 360 I find it fairly quite apart from when the disc drive is going full tilt while loading, which is also the time when their isn’t anything, be it game play, music or sound effects, to distract you. Once the game gets up and running I’m hard pressed to notice mine.
Mandatory anecdotal counter-evidence: my gamecube is almost silent even when it is accessing and reading the disc. I had forgotten to turn the gamecube off some nights, if I turn off everything else (game then stereo then TV) out of order. (My cube is recessed slightly into the shelves, so I don’t always see the light.)
I just want to gripe that my fat-PS2 is now as loud as my 2nd-hand launch XBox.
What? The 360 sounds like a vacuum cleaner even when its sitting on the dashboard with no disc in the drive. I can even hear the 360’s fan across the room when the console is turned off if its recharging the controller.
My 360 is loud when reading a disc and quiet otherwise. Quiet for DVDs as well, and I’m paranoid about device sound, valuing silence above most other things. I agree with Bago though – once you get other sounds going, the noise of a machine doesn’t really matter. My 8800 GTS in my PC is loud and annoying most of the time, but if I’m playing a game it’s not loud enough for me to hear it.
Odd. Mine is almost unnoticeable when not playing a 360 game. Dashboard, Arcade, DVD, or original Xbox game are all very, very quiet. I only notice it if there is no sound.
Now, when playing a 360 game, that is another story.
The Wii is surprisingly loud, but this article should be taken with a grain of salt. He’s got an absolutely horrible SPL meter and the methodology is flawed.
