Editing Quiet PC (section)

==History==
Prior to about 1975, all computers were typically large industrial/commercial machines, often in a centralized location with a dedicated room-sized cooling system. For these systems, noise was not an important issue.

The first [[home computer]]s, such as the [[Commodore 64]], were very low power and therefore could run fanless or, like the [[IBM PC]], with a low-speed fan only used to cool the power supply, so noise was seldom an issue.

By the mid-1990s as CPU [[clock speed]]s increased above 60&nbsp;MHz, "spot-cooling" was added by means of a fan over the CPU heatsink to blow air onto the processor. Over time, more fans were included to provide spot-cooling in more locations where heat dissipation was needed, including the [[3D graphics card]]s as they grew more powerful. Computer cases increasingly needed to add fans to extract heated air from the case, but unless very carefully designed, this would add more noise.
 
[[Energy Star]], in 1992, and similar programs led to the widespread adoption of [[sleep mode]] among consumer electronics, and the [[TCO Certified]] program promoted lower energy consumption.<ref>{{cite news |title=TCO takes the initiative in comparative product testing |access-date=2008-05-03 |date=2008-05-03 |url=http://www.boivie.se/index.php?page=2&lang=eng |archive-date=2007-07-23 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070723060821/http://www.boivie.se/index.php?page=2&lang=eng |url-status=dead }}</ref> Both added features that allowed systems to only consume as much power as is needed at a particular moment and helped reduce power consumption. In a similar manner the first low-power and energy-conserving CPUs were developed for use in laptops but can be used in any machine to reduce power requirements, and hence noise.