The CompuLab Airtop Continues Hitting Expectations As A High-Performance, Fanless PC

At the end of February I posted my initial hands-on with the passively-cooled Airtop PC that's been exciting many readers over its unique design and being Linux-friendly. As I hadn't written anymore about it in the past few weeks, some Phoronix readers had emailed me and tweeted, curious what the deal was and if it wasn't living up to expectations. That's not the case at all and the Airtop PC continues to exhibit great potential and is yet another solid offering from CompuLab.

Simply due to the load of Vulkan testing, the new AMD Linux driver, and other high-profile articles this month along with other time consumers like tax season here in the US and the changes to the server room, I just didn't have a chance to provide any more numbers until now. But I continue to be very happy with the performance -- both raw performance and the thermal performance -- of this passively-cooled PC.

As covered in my initial tests of the Airtop PC, it really does manage to deliver great performance while not exhibiting any fans nor any other noise (there's an SSD too over a hard drive) nor any whines from any of the components.

The review sample we were supplied with by CompuLab is powered by an Intel Core i7-5775C Broadwell processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB ADATA SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 graphics card.

CompuLab offers a choice of customers to order the Airtop with Linux pre-loaded with Linux Mint while this hardware should all be Linux-friendly (sans wanting to use the proprietary driver with the GTX 950 due to the less than ideal Nouveau driver support) so you can easily load up whatever modern Linux distribution you would like to use.