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.

Comments

Re:lol

[Harlequin80]

I don't see this as an advertisement as it is a review and pull down by a review site. Sure it's commodity hardware and its been possible to build your own fan less system for ages.

Personally if it had linked to Compulab or a press release puff piece then yes. This isn't going to interest everyone, personally I think the concept of a fanless PC of this spec is pointless, but it is a nice solution to the problem.

No fans at all?

[jeffb (2.718)]

How odd. I would have thought that a silent machine with reasonable power would garner LOTS of fans.

Please Test The Coil Whine.

[zenlessyank]

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.

Re:Please Test The Coil Whine.

[slaker]

I also found that to be true when I put together a system for my bedroom. And then I got a PicoPSU + transformer, only to find that the transformer had its own disagreeable little hum.

I went back to a traditional desktop and some fancy Noctua fans. They make noise I can hear but almost anything else I do is quiet enough for it to not be an issue.

Re:Please Test The Coil Whine.

[Neredera]

From http://airtop-pc.com/airtop/qu... :

Is Airtop totally silent?

[...]

High power electronics system usually has some acoustic side effect commonly known as "coil whine" caused by mechanical vibrations in coils and capacitors amplified by the PCB.
In the design of Airtop motherboard special attention was given to make it inaudible.
The power supply is also silent.

Belongs here

[duke_cheetah2003]

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

Re:Belongs here

[MightyYar]

It's fine, I guess. But I have to admit that I was pretty disappointed when I clicked on an article touting an "innovative" PC, only to find out that it was a rectangular box. I'd say "well-engineered", but not "innovative".

Re:Belongs here

[Dutch Gun]

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.

Re:Belongs here

[KGIII]

'Innovative' and even 'unique design' don't immediately scream aesthetics to me - not on this site. On other sites? Yeah, I'd expect 'unique design' to mean that it was some form factor other than rectangular. On this site? Not so much. We, as a group, seem more inclined to look at the engineering than the appearance.

On top of that, I'm not sure it's an ad? If it were an ad, why filter it through a third party site? That's a pretty popular and reasonably well trusted site here. It seems a rather roundabout way to do an ad and would mean that the site was probably in on it. I'm not sure that he'd risk his reputation on such as it might be seen as him biasing his reviews.

So, it's possible that it's an ad but it seems unlikely to me. It's a rather convoluted way that requires a conspiracy or complacency.

Re:Belongs here

[MightyYar]

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 :)

Re:One word: dust

[dejitaru]

It would probably perform better than a normal computer because there's no fans sucking in dust?

Re:lol

[whipslash]

$0

Re:lol

[enrique556]

Given that it links to a Phoronix article, it's hard to argue that it's an ad.. unless Michael Larabel owns shares in CompuLab and paid for it.

Interesting, but not that impressive

[TeknoHog]

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.

Re:Interesting, but not that impressive

[TeknoHog]

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.

Re:Is this junk

[dave420]

In the time it took you to write your questions, you could have found the answers...

Re:lol

[apoc.famine]

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