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CompuLab Rolls out Fanless, High-End PCs With Unique Design (phoronix.com)
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.
The article was written by a noob. The i7 5775c is a 3.3GHz CPU, not 3.7GHz. 3.7GHz is only the *turbo boost* clockspeed.
If they can't even get simple facts correct, then it doesn't lend much credibility to the rest of the article.
ever since BIZX acquired slashdot, we've been seeing these slashvertisements at least once per day (worse than Dice's twice-weekly rate). What's the going price for buying an article on slashdot these days?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
How odd. I would have thought that a silent machine with reasonable power would garner LOTS of fans.
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.
Advertisement or not, this is a pretty neat piece of engineering and definitely belongs on /.
I always had very high sensitivity to fans noise and dreamed of absolutely slient pc. I've finaly made it using streacom case. It's running great. Newer intel cpus also have good integrated GPU, so everything except gaming is simply exceptional (and I have a separate pc for gaming). But adding powerful GPU to the system was a pipe dream. If they have managed that in such a small case, that's beyond cool.
Not sure I'd call that spec high end but whatever.
The article was written by a noob. The i7 5775c is a 3.3GHz CPU, not 3.7GHz. 3.7GHz is only the *turbo boost* clockspeed.
If they can't even get simple facts correct, then it doesn't lend much credibility to the rest of the article.
My desktop has 6 fans in it, including the CPU fan and it is whisper quiet until I start playing Fallout, then my 970 kicks in and it sounds like a plane about to take off...
I used anti-vibration rubber screws and specifically choose fans that are designed to be quiet and went SSD for the OS drive. No need to go fanless these days...
It would probably perform better than a normal computer because there's no fans sucking in dust?
No one buys $2,200 PCs anymore, unless they are Apple. Come to think of it, no one buys desktop PC's for home anymore.
I've been building silent, often fanless systems since 2003, so I'm always interested at these rare occasions when a commercial offering actually cares about noise. However, I'm somewhat worried about the peak temperatures of 80 C, and frankly it doesn't surprise me. Passive cooling is hard, and it's almost always better to aim for the low hum of large, slow fans. I'm running high end GPUs fully loaded all the time, and they stay around 50...60 C with aftermarket coolers (not water) in open cases, with 140 mm fans running at 7..10 V. The same goes for CPUs, though I'm not sure if they count as high end. Anyway, quiet and cool is easily done with aftermarket coolers that cost around 50 euros apiece. I live in a single-room apartment, so the lack of noise is pretty important.
I always wonder why proper cooling seems like an afterthought in components such as motherboards and cases, and why you always need aftermarket solutions if you don't want your machine to sound like a jet engine. For example, if the CPU were at the backside of the mobo, there would be no limit to the size of the heatsink. Yet the default is always a very crowded place in the middle of everything, where the "solution" is a small and whiny fan.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If you strip everything out except the mainboard and the case (no cpu, no gpu, no ram, etc), you're still looking at $700. This is what they mean by "starts at".
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
You called it that - the rest of us called it what it was: A trash can.
Care to qualify why you think that is?
-Person who's run fanless system for many more than 2 years.
like the Gigabyte brick with the "Desktop" GPU that just clocks itself down when it gets hot.? Or is this just a laptop without a screen again?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not only do I have concerns about how this will work under very high ambient temperatures, I don't see it's usefulness for 99.99999% of users. If you are spending that kind of money, you could have a machine that is virtually soundless and has at least one and probably 2 high end GPUs. This really limits your options because of the unique form factor and I don't really see tradeoff.
For comparison, my PC with an overclocked i5 2500k and 7970 is 3 decibles above ambient (34 db in my apartment) as measured by an open vent in the top. That is actually coil whine, not fans. I could do the same thing to any single GPU machine for at most 400 USD and in most cases under 300.
Ha! You made me win a sandwich. When I opened the thread I knew there'd be some goober in here that said that. I told the missus and she said, "No, nobody's that dumb." (Yes, that is verbatim.) I said that I'd bet her a sandwich and she bet me a back rub. I'm getting a tune fish sandwich thanks to you! You're truly appreciated Mr. AC, truly appreciated. The best part is that you're using a computer made in China.
You're really predictable Mr. AC. Keep it up and I might raise the stakes for the next thread.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"However, I'm somewhat worried about the peak temperatures of 80 C, and frankly it doesn't surprise me"
The thermal limit of the i7 Broadwell CPU was/is 103 C. I have had it running around 70 C at 100% load, totally passive Akasa case. Normally it runs from 34 - 40 C under light load.
It doesn't surprise me that some of the Skylake Xeons will run at similarly high temps. Compared to stock, however, it seems that my passive build is more efficient at cooling, without the noise.
No one buys $2,200 PCs anymore, unless they are Apple. Come to think of it, no one buys desktop PC's for home anymore.
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[12:15 AM EDT March 1]
I like to run my systems hot: cooling is more efficient the hotter you run. If it is specked for it, you might as well use it.
Yup, great idea.
I like to run my systems hot: cooling is more efficient the hotter you run. If it is specked for it, you might as well use it.
Specifications are not binary. Things will generally last longer if they don't run at the extreme of allowed specs all the time, due to effects such as electromigration.
In the second hand GPU market, a lot of people are always worried about overclocking history. What they should be asking about is temperatures. In overclocking, it's not the frequency that kills components, it's the heat. And it's easy to do heat damage while staying within allowed frequencies. Long-term heat damage is also an issue for other components around the main chip, such as VRMs on a GPU board.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I've been thinking about just such a machine quite a lot lately. Rather than some sort of desktop gaming system, I'm more interested in a server solution. I'd really like to buy/build a server with Xeon CPU(s), 30-60GB of RAM, hardware RAID 5 6 10, SSDs, dual power supplies(ideal) and NO FANS.
I want a passively cooled and (near)completely silent server. A real server.
Does anyone know if/how I can achieve such a beast?
The only place I see 3.7GHz is in the linked chart from OpenBenchmarking.org, where it has the same description for every other benchmark for that processor.
Sonsonic PSU's are awesome. I have a 2u server where I needed a power supply that didn't have a bottom fan intake (would be blocked by the case). The only one I could find that fit was a Seasonic but it's been rock-solid for years without an issues. Quiet and reliable. A bit pricey but you're paying for a quality product.
Uhm, you did read the article, Right? it's got a bunch of tubes that act as chimneys, those are going to get clogged with dust even faster than a fan, since, smaller diameter opening. going to need one heck of a long pipe cleaner, or something else to get the dust and Kitty fuzz out of those!
Okay, but how does make it less than forcing air, dust, dandruff, etc from surroundings into it via a fan? I never said it wouldn't collect ANY dust.
Regardless of the presence of Mossad's finest spyware or not, I wouldn't buy it precisely because it is made in Israel.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Care to qualify why you think that is?
-Person who's run fanless system for many more than 2 years.
Perhaps because heat kills electronics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Except that fanless does not mean excessive heat. There's only a few components that generate heat and as long as that heat is piped away from the electronics and radiated in a sufficient way then there's no problem going fanless. Fanless designs typically engineer around constraints such as maximum heatsink size. Actually a quick survey of the 3 fanless systems I have in my house show that they all run at a lower temperature than my desktop across GPU, CPU and Motherboard temperature sensors. This includes a server, a HTPC, and a small form factor PC mounted to a telescope. So based on those sensors alone the fanless systems will last significantly longer than my main desktop PC.
But then your article doesn't cite any common failure modes of electronics and how they are measured. Thermal cycling inducing physical stress, and total thermal load on the device affects failure rate. Thermal cycling is almost a non issue outside of devices that operate in extremes and isn't a primary cause of failure in computers (where as it is in things like cars and industrial equipment).
Total thermal load is exponentially bad, but ultimately for junction temperatures kept below 90degrees your computer will die of you throwing it out long before thermal damage. For a typical consumer device if you keep the junction below 90 degrees you will achieve the full service life of the device. For applications with long service life requirements you ideally want to keep junctions below 70degrees which will give you a roughly 100 fold increase in reliability compared to the consumer target.
Not only is that trivial to do from an engineering perspective, but it ultimately improves device reliability as even under stress moving parts will fail before electronics will. There's a reason why a lot of industry hardened equipment is fanless.