With all the buzz surrounding the PlayStation 3’s announcement last week, one fact slipped under the radar – the PS3 will be the quietest of the next-gen consoles.
A games console’s cooling system usually requires several fans which can make quite a bit of racket, but Sony is claiming that the PS3, large and powerful as it is, belts out less noise than one of those tiny slimline PS2s.
It might seem like a small point – after all, most of us have the sound cranked up fairly loud when playing games – but when you consider that Sony and Microsoft are also battling it out in the movie and music-playing stakes, its importance is clear: Sony doesn’t want anything as simple as a noisy fan spoiling its machine’s Blu-ray and DVD playback. The Xbox 360, which will be receiving an HD-DVD player add-on before the end of the year, isn’t looking quite so hot – as anyone who owns one will know, its cooling fans are pretty darn loud. Kudos to Sony for keeping the racket down.
