Solid state active cooling on a Mini PC
theregister.com
theregister.com
My company issued HP zbook for Software Engineers is very loud and pushes lots of heat out. I would love a quieter alternative for large Windows laptops.
I had the 2015 MacBook. It was an oddball model which afaik never got a refresh: it didn't have any active cooling, had a 12" screen, a single USB-C port and a headphone jack, and was the and the first version of the terrible butterfly keyboard (which had to get replaced three times over its life!). I got it through my company for half price after an executive had gotten it for travel but couldn't get adapters to reliably work for presentations. The main things I remember about it (other than the terrible keyboard) were that it was delightfully portable and quiet, and that I had to consider the weather when I was deciding what to do. I haven't lived in a place with air conditioning in years, and in the summers I'd sometimes have to stop my chronic multitasking and decide if I wanted to browse/run other programs, or stream videos. On the rare occasions I'd do some programming and needed to compile something, I'd open the laptop halfway and put it on its side with a fan pointed at the back. I also put it on an ice pack on more than one occasion. I've always been surprised that condensation didn't kill it.
The new Airs seems like they solidly solve all of my complaints with the 2015 MacBook, which means I might finally have found a computer which can make me as happy as my Fujitsu LifeBook P1510D did. My only quibble might be that it's still a smidge larger than what I'd like, but it's a minor quibble.
that green module on the right is just ram. And Dell is trying to make this the future standard for ram modules in laptops. (ignore the dust on fans, I was in the middle of cleaning it).
The case was designed to have two columns, and one side was dedicated to fitting a full sized graphics card. The other column was the rest of the computer.
The graphics card had its own fan system, but I also needed a fan glued to the CPU and then an extra one at the bottom to help spit out exhaust. The thing ran so hot, and the cords ended up just jammed into the case where they fit.
I had no experience with building PCs and was amazed I could fit a 2TB Hard drive in a tiny little stick on the motherboard, whereas X amount of years before, I would have had to install a spinning disk, much bigger. Such a huge leap forward.
The main reason I wanted this form factor was because the perceived elegance of it appealed to me. But it became clear to me through the process that "small form factor" for enthusiasts is usually more about the challenge of building in a tight space. The thing is super loud with the fans and runs super hot when using it for gaming, even with a 1080ti card.
That's one of the reasons Apple's progress with CPUs is so great to me. I don't want the entire industry to move to SoC style where everything is soldered to the motherboard, but the more efficient you can make the rest of the computer, the better cooling system you can design. Just like the M.2 form factor for SSDs was a huge leap. But even if you can't eliminate the need for active cooling, something like this would make things a lot better. I think you'd still have to design around where the exhaust blows out though.
I think it'd be better to have the ARM increase in efficiency and then maybe combine it with something like this for extra powerful models, the way graphics cards are sold with the fans attached.
Someday I'd like to be able to upgrade the build and optimize it. The dream would be to not have any fans, but some other form of active cooling, and for the machine to be basically silent, while packing a 3090+ tier graphics card.
Through overzealous cleaning I broke the fans on my Ryzen 4800HS laptop but with the right fan-control software even that TSMC 7nm CPU operated largely fanless(they only spooled up above 80°C, which was rare) until replacements came in the mail.
The M1 in the Air is throttled to roughly half the TDP of other devices with the same chip, so it's not like you're getting all the performance it can offer.
That being said Apple's design is somewhat faster than competition using the same lithography.
Throttling only kicks in on the M1 Air when the CPU has been running full tilt for ~10m. Outside of that it performs identically the the regular M1 in a Mac Mini, iMac, or 13" MBP.
Even a lot of heavy users rarely keep the CPU pegged for that long. Most workloads are instead short and bursty. There's stuff like compiling Chromium that'll do it, but people who do that regularly should probably be looking at something like a 14" M1/M2 Pro MBP instead if portability is a priority.
It got really hot really fast if you did any graphics/video work on it, even more than regular laptops do.
I reckon you bought into it.
I think that analogizing persistent marketing propaganda to genocidal fascist propaganda is going a bit far.
Tell that to the millions of people who work on them daily without issue.
the macbook pro is crazy heavy.
Definitely a new one for me and an easy 'what? It works really well...'
Noise currently is worse than regular fans because it's higher pitched.
Tablet setups also can facilitate better keyboards and an eye-level screen, as shown by members in https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers
https://www.froresystems.com/application/handheld-gaming
I don't think they've actually built a prototype (the PDF and the website show off two separate designs) but it seems promising if these stop being as expensive as they are currently.
The LTT video quoted something like a 5+ year service life for the filters. That could probably be extended with disassembly and cleaning or potentially by replacing the filters which seem to basically just be a sticker that goes on top of the unit.
How about leaving the throttling on and making the device even cooler and quieter instead?
In other words, not at all solid-state. Some process they used to make a component reminds them of solid state manufacture techniques.
I think that description would be technically correct while also being very misleading to the average person, and I think that's why we've seen the colloquial definition of "solid-state" expand to effectively mean "non-mechanical" in some domains.
If you wanted a solid state clock source, that is a MEMS.
And further, no one calls, Crystal resonators “solid state” for marketing purposes, which is all that’s going on here.
If we operate by that definition these devices are very much solid so perhaps from context we can choose infer that they mean "non-mechanical" and not "made of semiconductors" rather than getting wrapped up in pedantry.
> And further, no one calls, Crystal resonators “solid state” for marketing purposes, which is all that’s going on here.
Yeah, a company is trying to communicate the benefits of their product using words that convey them i.e. HDD->SSD, fan->AirJet. We can shake our fists at the sky in righteous anger or we can acknowledge that there isn't really any harm to using the terms that evoke the right meaning for most people in a new context.
A crystal and this cooler - have moving parts. And don’t fit even a laissez-faire definition.
It's not even an HN-specific thing.
Arguing semantics is a time-honored method for derailing discussions. A sort of quasi-bikeshedding, except more often done in bad faith for creating a winnable meta-argument by someone who otherwise has nothing useful to say about (or was losing a debate of) the actual underlying subject.