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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.
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.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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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.