13. There Is Whisper-soft Operation Most Of The Time

Anyone who has to spend hours a day working with a notebook knows how important it is to have a machine that is acoustically unobtrusive.

In this respect the Compaq nx6125 works like a dream. In idle mode in Windows XP the system fan is inactive, and the hard drive is barely noticeable when accessed. Even when executing office applications such as Winword or Excel, the device operates with barely a murmur.

The cooling system in Compaq's nx6125 is whisper-soft even under high system workloads.

At 35 dB(A), the device can barely be heard when playing a DVD video (the room level during the test was approximately 34dB(A)). The fan stays off for one thing, and the drive is very quiet as well. The system fan switches on only when the CPU workload reaches a maximum. Under these conditions it is relatively quiet, however, with a noise level slightly above 38 dB(A). The fan speed does not increase even with the added load of the X300 graphics engine integrated into the Northbridge of the chipset. If you take away the load from the graphics subsystem and the Turion 64, the fan speed decreases somewhat after about 10 seconds, and the noise level falls by slightly more than one dB(A). It falls silent altogether after another 50 seconds. The nx6125 fan therefore has a follow-up control interval of about one minute.