Silent Quad Core AMD Fanless PC: the Continuing Journey of the Aleutia H4
Aleutia is in the process of carving out a real niche as a Fanless PC company, with a range of silent PCs that are not only passively cooled but do not suffer from noisy case fans or unreliable Power Supply fans. This is feasible with low voltage processors like the Intel Atom but we'd really like to offer a serious Dual Core and Quad Core PC for our customers who need that extra horsepower.
AMD have helped by at last releasing a line of updated CPUs with a TDP of just 45W. By comparison, Intel desktop CPUs are 65W and more and both AMD and Intel Quad Cores typically give off 95W of heat. Our H2 features the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200S (65W) rather than the Q8200 (95W) but it's expensive and 65W is just to much heat to passively cool in a small case (and pretty tough even in a large tower).
The AMD 600e has 4 cores at 2.2GHz and we've found a specialized heatsink that can passively cool it.
We've also found the world's smallest Micro ATX case and we'd love to offer it in this case (as mATX boards are much cheaper and allow for 8GB of RAM and more) but then we have the challenge of finding an mATX PSU without a fan or using a PicoPSU and connecting a 12V 9 Amp brick AC adapter which usually has a fan (and fanless versions are very expensive).
The solution is to mount the 600e and heatsink on a mini-itx board (in this case the Zotac 8200 with Nvidia 8200 IGP) but we need a case with a small footprint and a lot of height. I have looked at about 100 mini-itx cases but so far none fit the bill so we may have to custom make one. Need about 11 cm clearance.
Do any of our readers have a suggestion?
January 31st, 2010 - 23:51
How much will this H4 (AMD) cost ?
February 24th, 2010 - 10:19
Well i think we are instead going with a Core i5 fanless system with better onboard graphics.
Price will be under £500.