Comment by c0l0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by c0l0 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I am disappointed that fanless devices have been on the retreat these past several years. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo Yoga 710, with a fanless Intel Core m3-6Y30 (Skylake, 2 cores with HT). Performance was more than adequate for her work as a scientist. My current laptop is a Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5, with the same CPU installed. It's powerful enough for everything I do on the go. If I were to replace it, there's just no up to date fanless device available except for the Macbook Air - which will have to have decent GNU/Linux support before I can/will consider buying it.

But it's not just laptops that lose their fanlessness (which I appreciate both due to noise and reliability concerns), but also NUCs - almost every single NUC-like device that has entered the market and managed to come to my attention over the last months has had a fan installed. I wonder why that is - TDPs do not seem to have gone up, at least not when looking at data sheets... maybe it's just cheaper to make stuff that way.

To go fully passive while keeping the same amount of performance you need to use much more material, so in this case copper and/or aluminium. Moving that air around with a relatively cheap fan works well enough and allows for a smaller build.

This is also why it's generally recommended to go with a classic air cooler that just has the fan speed set to the lowest level over passive air coolers in desktop PC-s. It's still quiet, but you get the cooling performance while using much fewer resources.

> TDPs do not seem to have gone up, at least not when looking at data sheets...

Data sheet TDPs seem to have less connection to reality with each generation.

But with all of the boost clocks and what not, the more heat you can disipate, the faster the chip will go, and the power usage/temperatures can ramp really quickly too. Fans are so effective in most situations, that it's hard to leave them off and accept the performance difference. Personally, I'm ok with most fans, although I had to replace the PSU fan in my most recent build cause the included one had a noise profile I couldn't stand. For things like NUCs and Desktops, running longer cables and hiding the noise source is probably a good option too.

Yes, fan is cheaper.

- Copper is one of the most expensive materials, and it is hard enough, and have high melting temperature, so manufacturing also more expensive than from plastics.

When micro computers was inside 15W TDP this was not a problem, as heatsink was tiny, but for modern commodity designs, 25W+, need to use all surface of notebook as heatsink (at least one side of "shell"), this would be very expensive.

I bought a fanless quad core Apollo Lake Chromebook and installed Linux on it.

It's not perfect (headphone jack doesn't work), but been really happy so far. Probably the best $ per performance laptop I've ever purchased.

In addition to TDP, maximum ambient, case, or junction temperature is an extra dimension that needs to be considered.

Edit: Just did a search of junction temps for 10th, 11th, and 12th gen i5s... all 100C.

x86 chips that can run without a fan have disappointing performance, and the segment has been pretty stagnant. If a manufacturer wants to release a new NUC-like device with better performance than the old NUC-like device, they have little choice but to install a fan.

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