PCs offer plenty of customization and performance options, but they can be noisy beasts. This can spoil the experience of playing video games, or even watching movies or listening to music, but you can solve this problem in one fell swoop thanks to noise-cancellation technology.

High Performance Gaming PCs Are Always Noisy

While there are certainly many ways to build a quiet PC, and current-generation consoles are all but silent, by and large, any high-performance PC is going to make a fair bit of noise. You can fit special low-noise fans, and tune your fan curve to perfection, but at the high end there’s just no way to eliminate noise while also effectively removing heat.

Even liquid cooling brings its own noisemaker in the form of a liquid pump, and of course the actual noise of liquid moving through pipes and radiators. Unless you go to extreme measures such as using your PC from another room or building your own oil-cooled PC, you can’t have it both ways. More power means more noise.

Fan Noise Is Perfect for ANC Technology

This is where ANC or Active Noise Cancellation comes into the picture. This technology creates anti-noise that results in near silence. Different headphone makers have different algorithms, but in general, ANC is great at removing consistent droning noises like fans. At the same time, they struggle with sudden unique noises such as human speech or a loud bang.

That makes even lower-end ANC implementations perfect for dealing with fan noise, which is predictable and relatively simple to cancel out. I’ve used a half dozen headsets with ANC ranging from true wireless buds to the AirPods Max, and they’ve all erased that fan noise from existence.

Gaming Laptops Might Benefit the Most

With desktop PCs, you can at least mitigate noise by using larger fans at lower RPM, resulting in a low-pitch “whoosh” rather than a higher-pitch whine. Gaming laptops, unfortunately, don’t have as much room to maneuver. So they tend to have small fans spinning at very high RPM in order to keep things cool. Modern gaming laptops are a lot better in the noise department, but it’s still distracting and annoying.

I generally either use my AirPods Max or Sony WH-1000XM4 cans with my gaming laptop, and both provide me with blissful silence to enjoy my games, though not so much for anyone else with unshielded ears in the area! Since most people will use headphones with their gaming laptops anyway, you might as well use a set that lets you remove one of the biggest negative attributes of these portable PC gaming machines. Even devices like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally have somewhat noisy fans, so the same advice applies!

Spend Money on Headphones, Not Silent Parts

Unless you absolutely must play your games or consume your media using a speaker system, I’d say it’s better to invest your budget in a good set of ANC-equipped headphones instead. It might actually be cheaper than the dark and endless rabbit hole of silent PC design. Trying to get a PC to be truly silent rather than merely very quiet is a challenge few have ever managed. There have even been special sound-proofed PC cases, which have price tags of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” on them.

We’re always on the lookout for the best headphones, but you may already have a set of ANC headphones but have never thought of using this feature for gaming purposes. Once you hear how good games can sound without the noise of a thousand angry bees in the background, it will be hard to go back.