Right now I am running a high performance NOISY laptop.
There are times in the day I observe that when the fan turns off, I noticeably de-scrunch my shoulders. Clearly the fan is stressing me, even if in a slow creep way.
On the other hand, the previous laptop, though cooler and quieter, could not run five or six programs simultaneously and was limited to three without serious risk of crash/hangs. I can have a chat pgm, data feed, Outlook, Excel, and even Word all open without conniptions.
The odd thing about noise in general is that if you take a moment to observe, you already filter quite a bit of it out... the mind acknowledges it and relegates it to something it's already classified and thus doesn't need to reprocess. It only hears changes to what it's already processed.
I think the fan is troublesome because it turns on sort of randomly, making the tune-it-out scenario harder... but not impossible. I am working on not letting it get to me.
Mind you, I do not prefer a hot and loud PC, but given the two choices, I know so-so performance is not an option, having experienced the performance improvement. I only hope PC makers improve power consumption/dissipation in the next few years so that my next upgrade will be both hot performance and cool running.
Ana Maria