CompuLab Turns An 8-Core/16-Thread Xeon, 64GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 Into Fan-Less Computer

Three years ago we checked out the CompuLab Airtop as a high-performance fanless PC. Back then it was exciting to passively cool an Intel Core i7 5775C, 16GB of RAM, SATA 3.0 SSD, and a GeForce GTX 950 graphics card. But now in 2019 thanks to the continued design improvements by CompuLab and ever advancing tech, their newly-launched CompuLab 3 can accommodate an eight-core / sixteen-thread Xeon CPU, 64GB of RAM, NVMe SSD storage, and a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card without any fans!

The Airtop 3 just arrived from Israel earlier this month and I've begun putting it through its paces with our Linux benchmarks. Over the weeks ahead I'll begin posting more benchmarks from this passively-cooled, industrial-grade PC with Intel Xeon E-2288G processor and RTX 4000 Turing graphics, but given the reader interest when CompuLab announced the Airtop 3 back in April, I'm just sharing some initial impressions and first round of performance data today.

CompuLab remains a Linux-focused PC vendor and in fact Linux Mint's upcoming MintBox 3 computer is based on the Airtop 3. The MintBox 3 will soon be launching with different options for a high-end, passively cooled Linux Mint desktop -- they are also working on an option with open-source Radeon graphics. The Airtop 3 review sample to us also arrived with Linux Mint pre-installed.

This review sample had the Xeon E-2288G (Coffeelake eight-core + HT, 3.7GHz base frequency, 5.0GHz turbo, 95 Watt TDP), NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, 64GB of RAM, and Samsung 970 EVO PLUS 250GB NVMe SSD. It's quite beastly hardware for a completely air-cooled system. Besides the Xeon CPU having a 95 Watt TDP, the RTX 4000 has a 160 Watt maximum power consumption with its 2304 CUDA cores.