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CompuLab Rolls out Fanless, High-End PCs With Unique Design (phoronix.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the fanless-computer dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli PC maker CompuLab has begun shipping the Airtop PC that allows assembling high-end PC components into a completely fanless design. Phoronix's initial testing of the Airtop PC showed that it has a Core i7 5775C Broadwell processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and GeForce GTX 950 all while being fan-less thanks to the innovative design. The early results are quite positive for this uniquely designed PC but it comes at a cost premium of a fully-loaded system costing more than $2,200 USD.

5 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Please Test The Coil Whine. by zenlessyank · · Score: 4, Insightful

    After replacing the fans in my rig with ultra-low quiet ones, I found that the coil whine from the power supply and video card are more annoying than the whoosh of noisy fans. I'm too cheap to subscribe to phoronix's site, so maybe someone can suggest it to him.

  2. Belongs here by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Advertisement or not, this is a pretty neat piece of engineering and definitely belongs on /.

    1. Re:Belongs here by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd argue a rectangular box is still the most practical form factor for a PC and most other hardware (consoles, appliances, etc). The Mac Pro had a bizarre cylindrical shape which was pretty cool from a design standpoint, but ultimately didn't have much success in the marketplace. The PC ecosystem is designed around standardized, commodity parts that generally fit into a rectangular chassis. That's partly why PCs have such an amazing price-performance ratio.

      The only thing a non-rectangular box would do for me is to prevent me from fitting it under the desk in the slot designed for a rectangular box-shaped PC.

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      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:Belongs here by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My PCs I still go old-school and build myself. I usually buy a nice, quiet case. I don't really care what they look like too much, but one is in the spare bedroom and so I like that it's quiet. I do have a Mac in the living room. It's old, but it looks nice. I wouldn't want to spend all this money on nice living room furniture and then have a cheap, loud plastic box sitting in the middle of it. I saw a cool project online where a guy made a wooden PC case to match his furniture.

      I'm not sure I agree that there's much innovation going on in the PC space. It's very mature and there's not a lot that hasn't been done before. Sure, things get smaller and the detachable screen thing makes an appearance every few years - but at the end of the day notebooks generally all look like a mid-90s PowerBook and desktops look like variations on the original PC. All in ones got so small that they essentially just look like monitors. But I guess it is almost a philosophical question... where is the line between innovation and just solid engineering? The iPod was, I think, pretty innovative - but it didn't really do anything special or new. It was just smaller and had better engineering than the competition. So, shows what I know :)

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      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  3. Re:lol by apoc.famine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Have you considered upping your price and reducing the number of sidebar advertisements?

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    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor