fanless pc

You are currently browsing articles tagged fanless pc.

Fanless Small Network Server with Dual NIC and Low Power Intel Atom Processor

18 January 2010 in Uncategorized by michael | 1 comment

CD and hand shown for scale

Many customers buy the Aleutia T1 to use an always-on server. It supports PXE Network boot and can be configured to automatically Power On after Power Loss. It is also very low power, using only 17 Watts under load. With 500GB and 750GB 2.5″ laptop drives now affordable, this makes it ideal as a small, low power network server.

However, the T1 has only 1 network port (10/100/1000) and naturally a lot of projects require two network ports.

We recently solved this for one of our customers by using a PCI Gigabit Network card with full Linux support and mounting it with a riser card in a larger, ventilated case. This has the advantage of offering more air flow. It’s not VESA-mountable like the T1 but it can be wall mounted.

Unlike many fanless network servers, the T1 Dual NIC comes with 2GB RAM (OEM customers can have 512MB or 1GB for less) and a decent x86 processor in the Intel Atom N270 at 1.6GHz.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Fanless MacBook (or Why Fanless Rules)

2 July 2009 in Uncategorized by michael | No comments

Like many entrepreneurs, I began my startup (in October, 06) with a MacBook. I had rejected the shackles of Windows, with its endless patches, wizards, and flakiness, for a personal computer that “just worked”. Icons that bounced up and down, a better aesthetic, solid battery life, and a beautiful chassis made better by a Hokusai print from Gelaskins.

But Apple suffers from infant mortality. 1 week after my 12 month warranty expired, the hdd failed. This was before Time Machine and I lost everything, except that I didn’t because what mattered was in the cloud. Corporate email hosted by Google, photos on Flickr, spreadsheets on Google Docs, memos on BaseCamp, and even a handful of important presentations on Slideshare.

Now I build myself a new PC nearly every week and everything is in the cloud. I’ve learned that all hard drives fail. I’m lucky though – I have a 20Mb connection that costs me £18. Our partners in West Africa pay 100 times that for a VSAT that’s a 40th as fast. When you can’t back up to the cloud, you can’t trust a component that’s spinning around 7200 times per second. It will fail and everything is lost. Go Solid State or RAID it.

And now two years in, my MacBook’s fan has died. It was a sudden death – for months it has been so clogged with dust that it was slower and noisier and so when the processor started heating up, it would kick into 6000 RPM and you could hear it in the bedroom or throughout a starbucks. Absurd.

But then it failed. I would open smcFanControl (a popular OS X app), and watch the temperature rise from 35 C to 90 or even 92 C (practically boiling!) before it would shut off, an increase that took about 40 minutes if you were using Firefox or 5 minutes if I was having iPhoto resize photos for an iPod. And then you’d have to wait 3 hours for it cool down (I actually considering putting it in the fridge.)

Luckily I could buy a spare on eBay (£23) and install it using a tutorial on iFixit. It’s now load at 6000 RPM but not nearly as loud.

But what if I live in Yola, Nigeria (where 30 Aleutia E2s are installed)? No Apple store, no eBay seller with free Naija shipping…

Our B2 features a ridiculous Quad Core CPU and it has a massive 50mm heatsink on top but it still needs a short (though very wide) 1000 RPM fan on top. Silent but not fanless.

I’d love to offer serious performance but without the need for fans, whether water-cooled, or by using humongous (like more than a foot tall) heatsinks and custom cases. Or both perhaps.

Tags: , , , , ,

Fanless, Intel Atom 330 PC with DVI, 12V DC Input

31 January 2009 in Uncategorized by michael | 10 comments

The Aleutia team has been working on a fascinating project recently for a client in the hotel industry. Any PC that goes ito a five star room is going to have be small and silent but this one has to offer MPEG4 decoding, HDCP, and 1080p playback as well as DVI/HDMI output and ideally optical output.

We’ve actually achieved this (see my next post) though with the Achilles caveat of a fan, albeit a 13dB fan and we ultimately want to go fanless.

The “H1″ system pictured is a powered by two Intel Atom 1.6GHz processors. Though Intel brands this as Dual Core, the chips are actually on a seperate die and feature individual hyper threading – on Ubuntu this shows ups as 4 cores (a quad core Atom?). (Similarly the Intel Atom is just a rebranded Centrino, albeit at a great price).

It features Gigabit Lan, 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, and a coral reef of heatsinks to dissipate CPU heat, Northbridge heat, and more heat coming from an Ati 2400 GPU which provides DVI output and should shortly offer 1080p playback.

2.5″ Drive slot means you can go up 500GB at 5400RPM (about £90 these days) or 250GB at 7200RPM (about £60).

Completely silent, fanless, wall-mountable, and great as a Boxee box, HTPC, or just a powerful home/office workstation.

We’ll be selling it shortly without the PCI slot populated for customers who can get by with VGA output.

Measures: 190 x 205 x 83mm.

Author’s Note: In the end we decided the PCI interface was too mediocre for decent graphics and the onboard GMA 950 cannot drive HD. The H1 standard (single core Atom, onboard Nvidia 9400) can do 1080p playback but little else so we’re working on an Aleutia H3 which will combine a fanless AMD Sempron 140 2.8GHz (45W) with Geforce 8200 chipset. (This is a completely new Sempron – much faster with 1MB L2 Cache.)

Tags: , , , , ,