Streacom make some similar passively cooled cases, though nothing quite to the same extent so this is pretty impressive.
The one thing that concerns me with all these passive designs and especially when you get to this level cooling of the VRM components so hopefully thats being accounted for here.
The GPU temps are way too hot. My fanned versions run between 45 and 55c. Then again, with some tweaking, he could run the GPU 35W lower, with a mild overclock, and still gain the same performance (as Nvidia drivers ramp up the clock speed the colder the temps get).
GPUs are fine as long as sustained load temp is below about 90 (I have a lot of experience with this). You can't compare totally silent cooling to fans, it's amazing they got this working at all.
The point of this passive system is silence, yes? Then if a fan cooled system is equally silent ( measured from the typical listening distance ) then the two can and should be compared. I've gone down the rabbit hole of passive systems and have learned it the expensive way that it's pointless to optimize above ambient noise. Yes, in theory it's better not to contribute to the ambient noise. In practice, if you cannot measure it - let alone hear it, you're better off not making the compromises required to get there. Effectively silent is better than silent ;-)
"The point of this passive system is silence, yes?" Sometimes. But in industrial environments, the point of a passive system can be no moving parts and no dust ingress points. If all you want is an HTPC and you want it to be very quiet to not ruin your movie watching experience, one or two slow moving fans and large heatsinks might be a better (and cheaper) bet, especially if you maintain the thing every once in a while (remove dust from filters and heatsinks etc.).
The point of passive systems are not just silence. Durability is a key feature to systems with no moving parts or need for ventilation. I install kiosk PC's in plants for CAD/CAM manufacturing all the way down to simple shipping PC's at loading docks. These are filthy areas exposed to elements. Salt in the air from the ocean nearby and basic debris wreak havoc on PC's with any airflow.
Fair point. Also a fair point is you can have a near inaudible 15€ fan cooling the case/external heatsink and replace the fan if it breaks. No need to blow dirt into the case. You only need to increase the dissipation.
And that person replacing the fan costs 50€ just to replace that fan (if they are lucky). Because the person at the computer has to make an order for that person to arrive, the person who arrives has to first read the order and then order the part or get it out of storage, then go to the destination, shut down the PC, maybe disrupt the assembly line, replace the fan, start everything back up and fill out the completed form. So that is at least half an hour of man time, possibly even more. Because that is how business works. I am not allowed to replace a light bulb at my job. That is not my job and if I do it and mess up, there is a liability issue. So I issue an order to replace the light bulb. That costs a lot. Same with a fan. So if you can invest 1000€ more, once, to not have to deal with that, it's a logical decision.
For me the interest is in the lack of noise, broadcasting and other noise sensitive activities or environments need as little ambient sound as possible.
Laptops are limited by the size and mass of the passive cooling solution. <8W TDP laptops can be easily cooled passively, while at 15W TDPs and above things get progressively trickier. At 45W TDP (which high end gaming laptops have) passive cooling should be impossible, unless you make the laptop super thick and heavy.
Bang on. My Ryzen 5 3550h powered laptop has touched 96 degrees C with the stock laptop air cooling system. A dab of Arctic MX-4 reduced the temperatures by 5 - 10 degrees C. What this told me is that laptops are severely limited by their form factor, and people still want paper thin laptops that don't overheat.
Gaming is unnecessary. I have a spare phone laying around for that sort of thing. A PC needs to accomplish low demand work tasks that require a fair amount of typing or a larger screen for comfortable document viewing. I like my Bay Trail laptop because it has no fan, but its hard to find enough storage capacity in a passive laptop or even a user replaceable storage solution at all in conjunction with no cooling fan noise and the ability to sit atop fabric surfaces without overheating.
nice very impressive cooling but it is only ever going to be as good as the ambient background delta allows it wonder if they would consider a fanless water loop linked to the heat exchangers
Probably not. A lot of points of failure for not that much more gain. Heatpipes essentially act as "water cooling" in this case. All the water does in a normal loop is allow quick and easy transfer of the heat to the (larger) ratiators. The heatpipes to exactly that. The advantage of watercooling is flexibility (unless you like hard line tubing), where soft tubes can connect a ton of blocks to radiators, whereas heatpipes are harded to route through a system.
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FreckledTrout - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Pretty cool. Didn't know this existed.Pyxar - Wednesday, December 23, 2020 - link
Me either, i'll be checking them out!Operandi - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Streacom make some similar passively cooled cases, though nothing quite to the same extent so this is pretty impressive.The one thing that concerns me with all these passive designs and especially when you get to this level cooling of the VRM components so hopefully thats being accounted for here.
HollyDOL - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Looking on the gpu block detail (the 2nd photo from bottom) it seems the answer is yes.ProDigit - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
The GPU temps are way too hot.My fanned versions run between 45 and 55c.
Then again, with some tweaking, he could run the GPU 35W lower, with a mild overclock, and still gain the same performance (as Nvidia drivers ramp up the clock speed the colder the temps get).
Death666Angel - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
"The GPU temps are way too hot." No.Flunk - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
GPUs are fine as long as sustained load temp is below about 90 (I have a lot of experience with this). You can't compare totally silent cooling to fans, it's amazing they got this working at all.igavus - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
The point of this passive system is silence, yes? Then if a fan cooled system is equally silent ( measured from the typical listening distance ) then the two can and should be compared. I've gone down the rabbit hole of passive systems and have learned it the expensive way that it's pointless to optimize above ambient noise. Yes, in theory it's better not to contribute to the ambient noise. In practice, if you cannot measure it - let alone hear it, you're better off not making the compromises required to get there. Effectively silent is better than silent ;-)Death666Angel - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
"The point of this passive system is silence, yes?" Sometimes. But in industrial environments, the point of a passive system can be no moving parts and no dust ingress points. If all you want is an HTPC and you want it to be very quiet to not ruin your movie watching experience, one or two slow moving fans and large heatsinks might be a better (and cheaper) bet, especially if you maintain the thing every once in a while (remove dust from filters and heatsinks etc.).Samus - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
The point of passive systems are not just silence. Durability is a key feature to systems with no moving parts or need for ventilation. I install kiosk PC's in plants for CAD/CAM manufacturing all the way down to simple shipping PC's at loading docks. These are filthy areas exposed to elements. Salt in the air from the ocean nearby and basic debris wreak havoc on PC's with any airflow.SirPerro - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Fair point. Also a fair point is you can have a near inaudible 15€ fan cooling the case/external heatsink and replace the fan if it breaks. No need to blow dirt into the case. You only need to increase the dissipation.Death666Angel - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
And that person replacing the fan costs 50€ just to replace that fan (if they are lucky). Because the person at the computer has to make an order for that person to arrive, the person who arrives has to first read the order and then order the part or get it out of storage, then go to the destination, shut down the PC, maybe disrupt the assembly line, replace the fan, start everything back up and fill out the completed form. So that is at least half an hour of man time, possibly even more. Because that is how business works. I am not allowed to replace a light bulb at my job. That is not my job and if I do it and mess up, there is a liability issue. So I issue an order to replace the light bulb. That costs a lot. Same with a fan. So if you can invest 1000€ more, once, to not have to deal with that, it's a logical decision.Pyxar - Wednesday, December 23, 2020 - link
For me the interest is in the lack of noise, broadcasting and other noise sensitive activities or environments need as little ambient sound as possible.TheWereCat - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
88°C after 22h in FurMark is amazingly good for passive cooling.blackworx - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
That's not "way too hot". Not for 22h sustained full load.PeachNCream - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Pretty impressive work for standard wattage desktop hardware. Now if we could have more fanless laptops that'd be nice.Santoval - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Laptops are limited by the size and mass of the passive cooling solution. <8W TDP laptops can be easily cooled passively, while at 15W TDPs and above things get progressively trickier. At 45W TDP (which high end gaming laptops have) passive cooling should be impossible, unless you make the laptop super thick and heavy.OffPoynt - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Bang on. My Ryzen 5 3550h powered laptop has touched 96 degrees C with the stock laptop air cooling system. A dab of Arctic MX-4 reduced the temperatures by 5 - 10 degrees C. What this told me is that laptops are severely limited by their form factor, and people still want paper thin laptops that don't overheat.PeachNCream - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Gaming is unnecessary. I have a spare phone laying around for that sort of thing. A PC needs to accomplish low demand work tasks that require a fair amount of typing or a larger screen for comfortable document viewing. I like my Bay Trail laptop because it has no fan, but its hard to find enough storage capacity in a passive laptop or even a user replaceable storage solution at all in conjunction with no cooling fan noise and the ability to sit atop fabric surfaces without overheating.jospoortvliet - Saturday, January 4, 2020 - link
... and nobody edits their holiday pictures or videos on their laptop, which is certain to be dog slow on a bay trail.And that's not even talking about having more than 4 Facebook tabs open or running a few "electron" apps.
alufan - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
nice very impressive cooling but it is only ever going to be as good as the ambient background delta allows it wonder if they would consider a fanless water loop linked to the heat exchangerskhanikun - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
That's what I as thinking myself. A water loop with passive radiators. Like the old Innovatek passive radiators.Death666Angel - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Probably not. A lot of points of failure for not that much more gain. Heatpipes essentially act as "water cooling" in this case. All the water does in a normal loop is allow quick and easy transfer of the heat to the (larger) ratiators. The heatpipes to exactly that. The advantage of watercooling is flexibility (unless you like hard line tubing), where soft tubes can connect a ton of blocks to radiators, whereas heatpipes are harded to route through a system.s.yu - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Saw this guy's stuff before, didn't realize it's now named "Turemetal"...Danvelopment - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
One of these would be amazing if they could supply a passively cooled version of the FSP Twins.Imagine a completely passive silent home server (just built one with an R7-2700 and 2x NVMe drives in RAID1 in a huge actively cooled tower case).
On the other hand my server is pretty quiet but my UPS makes a racket, so maybe it won't improve anything.