Which Next Gen Console is the Noisiest? If you wish to link to this article, please use this link. Thank you.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have now all released their consoles into the wild. Microsoft had a year head start. Nintendo has made a huge leap towards catching up and Sony is doing their best as well. Now that all three consoles are in the wild, I was curious to determine which console made the most noise. I’m certain I’m not alone in this thought.
When the Xbox 360 was released many gamers complained about how “loud” the console was. Gamers everywhere were concerned that their consoles were going to rattle off their shelf or that they couldn’t hear their grandmother knitting while they were playing Gears of War. Sure every game supports Dolby Digital and is meant to be connected to a super-duper audio system and cranked, but that didn’t stop gamers from complaining. To be fair, I do all my gaming at night and have to keep the sounds down for fear of waking up my kids or my wife. And yes, the 360 seemed really loud to me.
But it wasn’t necessarily the sound of the system itself that was creating the noise. Many gamers realized that it was actually the sound of the DVD drive spinning at 12x that caused much of the noise. Playing Geometry Wars all night, while probably giving you little green spotted nightmares, wouldn’t cause your ears to give you a nice tinnitus ring in the morning.
When the first batch of 360’s starting failing many gamers claimed that their replacement consoles were quieter than their predecessors. There were also reports of different types of drives being used and that each one had a different noise factor.
When the PS3 was released in late 2006, it was almost as difficult to find as the Xbox 360 at launch. Reports are now in all over the Country that PS3 are readily available at most retailers. The initial reports of the PS3 were that they were incredibly silent. I then read a review in Sound and Vision on the BluRay aspect of the PS3 and the author complained that the PS3 was incredibly loud; louder even than his Toshiba HDA1 HDDVD drive. I have one of those and it is pretty loud. Granted I typically do not notice it with the sound from the movie cranked, but on low level scenes I can sometimes hear the fans of the HDA1.
After reading the Sound and Vision report I was intrigued. Since I own all three consoles I figured I could test them all under various circumstances and determine which was the loudest – on a semi-scientific basis. And even if not entirely scientific, I took steps to measure the noise of each console under the same circumstances and from the same areas.
Going into this little study I expected the Wii to be the most quiet and the 360 to be the loudest, with the PS3 falling somewhere right around the middle. My findings were quite a bit different than I expected.
LOCATION
Each of my consoles is located in a different area. My Xbox 360 is located in a shelf above the TV in my office. The area is fairly open, although the area behind the Xbox 360 is not very deep. It looks like this:
My PS3 is located in a shelf above the TV in my main theater area. The shelf area in which the PS3 sits is fairly deep and open. It looks like this:
My Wii sits on a shelf in the main theater area. This area is very deep, housing my center channel and some photos. It looks like this:
And before you ask, yes, I have a daughter, and no that is not my Barbie movie! Haha.
My thought was that the location of the console may have something to do with the noise generated. If the console was getting hot, it would need to use its fans to cool it down, thereby generating more noise. Unfortunately I didn’t have the luxury of moving them around to see if they would be noisier or not depending on location. The manner in which I tested should, however, negate this variable.
For the sound measurements I used the analog SPL meter from Radio Shack that so many of us have come to use and love to calibrate our audio systems. Since the lowest reading offered is 60dB (or I guess technically 60dB – 10 or 50dB), It was difficult at first to get a reading. My solution was to place the SPL meter as close to the console as possible without actually touching it. I arbitrarily chose the right side of the 360 and PS3 and the left side of the Wii. These locations are seen in the photos above and the in the full resolution version of the photos in the link below.
TESTING Base dB Reading
My first test was of the base dB output of the console with no games running. This included games on the console’s hard drive as well as on external media. The results were interesting. The Xbox 360 clocked in at a base dB output of right around 55 dB.
Without anything running and right after startup, the PS3 clocked in at a base dB output of right around 53/54 dB. It looks like 54 from this photo because of the angle, but was right between the two.
Without anything running and right after startup, the Wii clocked in at a base dB output of right around 51 dB; almost immeasurable on the SPL meter.
Playing Games on Hard Drive
My second test was to play games on the hard drive of each component to determine whether that resulted in increased fan noise. I played Live Arcade titles on the 360, Tekken 5 on the PS3 and Wii Forecast on the Wii. After a short time playing a Live Arcade game, I noted no general output difference from the Xbox 360. I also noticed no general output difference from the Wii. After playing only 6 rounds of Tekken 5 on the PS3, on the other hand, I noticed a measurable difference in sound output.
Whereas the PS3 measured only 53 dB at rest, after roughly 10 minutes of hard drive play the sound output increased to 64 dB, an almost 10 dB increase.
I did return home one day and found the PS3 on. Not sure how it was turned on while I was away and I won’t even venture to guess. But the console was pretty hot and the fans were running pretty strong. I surmise that the fans would have kicked in and the noise above generated even had I not played anything on the hard drive.
Needless to say I was surprised by these results. I moved on to games on the media thinking that the faster spinning of the Xbox 360 would move it back into the loudest console.
Playing Media Games
My third test was to load a media based game into each console and measure the sound output of each console. I started with Gears of War on the 360. Whereas the 360 had a base dB output of 55 dB at rest, once the game was loaded, the sound output increased to 61dB, approximately a 6 dB increase.
I then loaded up Riiiiiiiiiiiidge Racer 7 on the PS3 and gave it a quick run. Whereas the PS3 had a base dB output of approximately 53 dB at rest, with the game loaded, the sound output increased to a little over 65 dB. While only approximately a 1 dB increase over the noise generating playing a game on the hard drive, this represented an approximately 11 dB increase from at rest.
After that I loaded up the Wii with Wii Sports. 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!
(Please note that to obtain the measurement I had to increase the SPL meter to a base reading of 70 dB, from the 60 dB I had used for the other measurements. If you zoom in on the photo you can see the 70.)
CONCLUSION
I realize that my testing was not entirely scientific. It was simply designed to give me a base sound output using a particular format that I could apply to each console. After I performed all of these tests I thought that perhaps because the DVD drive on the Xbox 360 was on the others side from where I had measured, that the results might be different had I measured the sound output on the left side of the console while playing a game. To be fair, the BluRay drive on the PS3 is located on the rights side of the console. I tested the console again and found that the sound output from the Xbox 360 increased to roughly 62 dB, or 1 dB more than that measured on the right side of the console.
This obviously changed the location of where I measured and threw all the hard scientific work I had performed down the drain! Not really. Because the result was fairly negligible, I did not go back and check to see if the PS3 or Wii offered up different measurements from different locations around the console. I wanted to have a fairly consistent procedure for measuring the sound output of all of them. Not to shake my own bell, but I believe I did a fairly decent job.
The results were a bit amazing to me. Whereas I fully expected the Wii to be the quietest and the Xbox 360 to be the loudest, while playing games, the results were reversed and the PS3 was louder than most people thought. If you are judging your consoles on noise alone (and by noise I don’t mean the noise coming out of the speakers while playing a game), the consoles stack up as follows:
1. Xbox 360 – on average least noisy, generally level noise output
2. PS3 – Not noisy at first, but fairly noisy once on for a short while
3. Wii – Virtually no noise… until you play a game and then the noisiest of the bunch
LINK to all Photos including Full Res Versions 
Linear Mode
