With forced cooling mode on (ST + MODE pressed simultaneously, forces cooling fan to be ON all the time), highly recommend using on T300, because it is great, but very flawed product, it would serve as a safety measure, just in case. With force cooling ON, T300 wheel base produces a fan hum slightly louder than average laptop’s fan at light load, but it is less whiny and high pitched, it is more on the dull and lower pitch side.
But the wheel base, the steering wheel itself and the pedals do produce the occasional crack and creek, they can be towards the annoying side, not because of overall loudness they produce, but more so the randomness of the noises. And the steering wheel’s gear shift paddles can produce loud click, think PC mouse on steroids.
The force feedback motor also produces noise, if you ever heard electric motor hum, whine, it is like that, just not loud at all, and only audible towards the max force feedback settings.
Overall from my personal experience, it is not the loudness, noise level on its own that is the problem. Some people can not stand the randomness of noises and the inconsistency, because to them it is very annoying (think constant light headache, versus a pulsating light headache, one tends to be more annoying to most people).
In short it is not a loud device, but it can be annoying without a background noise in some cases. If you will use it in living room with TV on, I do not think it should be a problem, but TV off will depends on the person in the room, maybe they will find it more annoying than loud.
