Tiny, Passively-Cooled Gaming PC – Compulab Airtop 2



Small, quiet, powerful – normally you have to pick two – but Compulab thinks they have changed that with the Airtop 2.

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28 thoughts on “Tiny, Passively-Cooled Gaming PC – Compulab Airtop 2”

  1. Anyone interested in a totally fanless small PC with a lot of power
    needs to take a close look at the Airtop2 by Compulab in Israel.
    They are fanless, convection cooled PCs with a staggering amount of IOs.
    The lowest power SOC they put in them is an i7 at this time. All are built to order and
    there are a few weeks wait but it's totally worth it to own one.
    They won't get hot under extreme loads thanks to the convection principle of cooling.
    They have zero moving parts and designed to run 24/7.
    Compulab will also install Linux for you if that is your desire.
    I have bought a lot of PCs over the years (mostly for work) and I consider the Airtop2 the best PC purchase I have ever made.
    They call it "passive cooling" but thanks to convection it is actually active cooling without fans.

    Reply
  2. It did lose to our open air bench (the cooling of which will not be disclose, just that it wasn't inside a case: you won't know if we used a Noctua DH-15 or a stock cooler, a water cooled Hybrid GPU or a reference design). Very useful comparison. We will also not disclose our ambient temperature or use temperature deltas over ambient like sane reviewers have since 2007. I maxing at 65 means one thing when ambient is 15 Celsius and another entirely when it's 35, which a most people in the world experience every single summer. I get target audience but still, 15C and 25C is a BIG difference and not knowing which ambient temp you're at makes your temperature results … less than ideal.

    You can ALSO! Put in a micro SD (let us pretend that most notebooks don't have that, or that a usb card reader isn't far more convenient) , TWO SIM cards (?!?), a wifi card (technically a mini-PCI-e card) which is nice to have, another slot for a mini PCI-e card (wow, this is like a Thinkpad from 2011 – x220 FTW) and a whole 64 GB MAXIMUM supported memory (let us not talk about memory speeds). Indeed, a lot of expansion… From 2012.
    I mean… Gloating about how expandable it is when a VERY successful notebook 7 years its senior can match that expandability is just sad. Sure it doesn't have a GPU slot, but it has keyboard, screen, battery and weights 10 pounds less. And oh, are we comparing completely different things like a particular cooling solution to one not described at all? What a thing!

    Reply
  3. Just 4y ago a basic quadcore was considered a good Gaming CPU, now you get a quadcore in a fricking pentium CPU and 16 cores in a I7, just because AMD being able to compete again 😀
    Competition is always a good thing… for the consumer

    Reply

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