Cirrus7 – Fanless Mini-PCs | Hacker News Reader

Cirrus7 – Fanless Mini-PCs

cirrus7.com

27 pointsleonry8 comments

One thing that always irked me when it came to configurations is that a device is advertised as "starting at $599" but has a bunch of specs like "Up to I9, 64gb of ram, etc.). I understand from a marketing perspective, but it is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to these websites.

I’d be particularly interested in something along these lines in a 1U form factor if anybody is familiar with such a thing. Obviously the actual fan-less-ness is less important in that use case but I have a hard time justifying high wattage hardware for my home server operation, and racking provides a lot of convenience.

If you get a 1U mini-itx case, you can put pretty much whatever in there. Finding a heatsink that fits will be a challenge, but they're out there. Expect thermal throttling (or set a low power throttle, which is inline with your desire to reduce watts anyway)

Take a look at the Supermicro brochure. Not sure the height is 1U, but the E100 and E302 series look interesting and are fanless. The E300 series I believe is a compact 1U but does have some active cooling. I myself have been eyeing getting one of these but haven’t decided on which one yet.

https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/brochure/brochure_Embedde...

Nice, looks interesting, especially for the price points mentioned. Since using my RPi 4 with a passive heatsink as my daily desktop computer for a year now, I'm looking for slightly beefier options. I would love to be able to play SuperTuxCart again, it just doesn't work on my RPi.

Looks interesting, been looking at putting something similar together myself.

Fanless does scare me a bit though. How does the temperature envelope look like when your maxing out the CPU or other components? I guess it'll start to throttle at one point, question is how quickly and how much.

Maxing out at the 12900T means they are using laptop-level SKUs. The nominal TDP of 35W [0] is what you see in high end, performance-oriented laptops. Unsophisticated thermal designs can handle this easily. I have a cheap fanless mini PC from AliExpress. The thermal solution is an all-aluminum case, to which the CPU is coupled with thermal paste. The body is thicker than your typical case to provide thermal mass. The outer surface has thick grooves (approximately 1/2cm). This thing never comes close to throttling. A more sophisticated passive solution that could create convective air movement would dissipate much more heat.

[0] I am fully aware of the flaws in the TDP published by CPU manufacturers, but the listed value is useful as a qualitative categorization.

These look really nice hardware. I wonder if there's any chance of coreboot on them...

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