The Airtop Is One Of The Coolest Linux-Friendly PCs Ever For Enthusiasts

[Mike Frett]

No Skylake. Do not want.

*continues typing away on new Skylake notebook and desktop*

You mean the Skylake that causes PCs to freeze when performing complex workload? Yeah, no thanks. Intel has been quite buggy these past years.

[SystemCrasher]

You mean the Skylake that causes PCs to freeze when performing complex workload? Yeah, no thanks. Intel has been quite buggy these past years.

Sorry, they've been too busy inserting NSA backdoors into their ME stuff and somesuch.

[stiiixy]

CompuLab might be able to respond in the forums, but without getting my hands on the system yet, doubt the GPU would be too easily swappable considering I am pretty sure they designed a custom heatsink for the GPU to fit with the case. Haven't heard anything about an AMD CPU option but that really wouldn't be interesting anyways until Zen.

Grab a chunk of aluminium, have a metal shop grind out some grooves and then drill some holes that match the card. It's not rocket science. Convection is ridiculously simple, and as the f1st/2nd poster mentioned, cold air in the bum, hot air out the top.

The only other thing you really need worry about (besides shorting out your shit) is pointing your fin'n'bits for as good as you can get on consumer hardware optimal airflow and using copper (transfer) bases with aluminium (radiation) fins for the best of both worlds for only pennies block if it's available.

[Ardje]

I hope they did not forget to silence the PSU.
Once the fans are gone, all that's left is the humming of the iron.
And even the old IR remotes made (hearable) sounds. (They still do, but you have to be very young to even hear the current generation of IR remotes).

[BillBroadley]

Seems kinda odd and looks expensive. Why in the world would you take an unpopular broadwell based chip known for it's GPU, then pair it with a low end nvidia?

You end up taking a big hit on the clock rate (3.3 GHz-3.7 GHz instead of 3.4-4.0 GHz) just to fit the integrated GPU in. For their target market seems like a skylake xeon would be a MUCH better decision. Better perf, better perf/watt, lower power memory (DDR4 vs DDR3), a nice M2 slot for storage, and ECC. Seems silly to brag about a system designed for 5 years old that's already a generation out of date.

[drSeehas]

i wonder about the price...

Look at the end:

http://anandtech.com/show/9958/compulab-rollsout-passivelycooled-airtop-systems

[pal666]

They have heat pipes embedded in the side panels to channel the heat from the CPU and the GPU to the full extend of the dissipating panel which has fins and convection airflow channels. They claim 100W of heat dissipation per side (100 for CPU and 100 for GPU) and nothing about their design suggests they are making that up. It probably works just fine.

active cpu coolers have heatpites and larger surface area and fans, so obviously they are making that up. there are passive coolers, one cooler can be put it this case it you remove from it everything else. and they still depend on airflow from case fan

[lvlark]

Alert : Subliminal advertizer detected

Is it POLARIS with POLARIS and POLARIS ? if POLARIS then POLARIS else POLARIS end POLARIS.

Oh bite me. I'm interested in this Airtop, and also interested in that GPU. While not worded very strongly in that post, I meant to say that 'Polaris will first have to be released' before we can tell if it's worthwhile. So you might think twice before you go about your alerts.

[Sonadow]

You mean the Skylake that causes PCs to freeze when performing complex workload? Yeah, no thanks. Intel has been quite buggy these past years.

A bug which no general user is expected to trigger at all under any circumstances.

[leech]

For the love of all that is holy, please sell this design to Sony so I can get a PS4 that doesn't howl when I play games on it! A little more seriously, this thing has better hardware than any of the game consoles, and yet even after all of the fan issues with the PS3 and overheating and issues with xbox 360, Sony and Microsoft couldn't fix them by doing something like these guys built?