Tuesday, February 27th 2018
Compulab Kickstarts Their Fanless Airtop2 Inferno Mini-PC With GTX 1080 Inside
Compulab has taken to Kickstarter as a way to subsidize the development and production of its Airtop2 Inferno Mini-PC. This aims to be a be-all, end-all Mini-PC that enables high-quality gaming in a fanless, noiseless design. Its insides are positively bursting with top notch hardware: it'll be powered by an Intel i7-7700K (95 W TDP) and the desktop version of Nvidia's GTX 1080 (180 W TDP). If it ever begins actual production, that is; nothing against Compulab, but Kickstarter itself seems to have one too many of these cases popping out.
Compulab's solutions use their metal side panels as "immense" radiators to dissipate the heat buildup inside the chassis. A number of heatpipes and air channels are built into these side panels' structure, so as to allow for better heat dissipation and usage of natural warm air convection. Besides the top of the line CPU and GPU, the Airtop2 Inferno packs a C236 chipset motherboard (a Z170 equivalent). It's possible to install up to 4x DIMMs, 4x 2.5" HDD or SSD solutions, and 2x NVMe SSDs.
There's a choice of five configurations for the Inferno: Half Life, Skeletal, Demonic, Diabolic, and Doomsday. The Half Life ($1,699) configuration only includes the motherboard and CPU - users will then have to find compatible parts for the rest of the components. The Skeletal ($2,480) configuration adds a GTX 1080. The Demonic ($3,170) configuration is the cheapest complete system, with all the earlier, and 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SATA SSD. The Diabolic ($3,961) configuration upgrades that to 32 GB of RAM and added storage in the form of a NVMe SSD. Finally, the Doomsday ($7,478) edition maximizes everything with 64 GB of RAM, 4x SATA SSDs, and 2x NVMe SSDs.
It's an all or nothing project, which might help prevent a case of broken dreams: the project will only charge customers if the funding goal is met. This likely means Compulabs knows exactly how much it needs to be able to deliver the project to reality. It might be an interesting one to see come to fruition. If you're interested, the Kickstarter is running right now through March 25th. The company also posted some benchmarks of what the Airtop2 Inferno can achieve, and this little box that likely will has some impressive results to post for such a small form factor.
Sources:
Compulabs Airtop2 Inferno Kickstarter, fit_iot
Compulab's solutions use their metal side panels as "immense" radiators to dissipate the heat buildup inside the chassis. A number of heatpipes and air channels are built into these side panels' structure, so as to allow for better heat dissipation and usage of natural warm air convection. Besides the top of the line CPU and GPU, the Airtop2 Inferno packs a C236 chipset motherboard (a Z170 equivalent). It's possible to install up to 4x DIMMs, 4x 2.5" HDD or SSD solutions, and 2x NVMe SSDs.
7 Comments on Compulab Kickstarts Their Fanless Airtop2 Inferno Mini-PC With GTX 1080 Inside
that's the nice thing about Kickstarter over Indiegogo. With Indiegogo, good luck, watch your money gogo good bye! with KS, if it doesn't meet its goal, it's done. Of course, you always have the risk that they "underestimated the fulfillment requirements/production costs/shipping embargo risks" etc ....
Someone also have to teach Compulab what a PNG is is, as those over compressed JPEG's just look terrible.
@Raevenlord you might want to try for the original images, rather than the tiny ones you added to the post, for example ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/020/334/659/dc4c9f24eb51c91bb882eca00487e728_original.jpg?w=680&fit=max&v=1519392912&auto=format&q=92&s=3eb1a975f4c4f7c591c11d3997fce20e
They won't look less crap, but at least you can sort of read the text.
Full load on i7-7700K (4.2/4.5 GHz) resulted in 3.3-3.4 GHz and with medium load, 4.0-4.1 GHz. This in reality is anywhere between 90 and 100 watts of heat. With medium load, probably lower.
GPU seemed to fare better for whatever reason, probably because of lighter load.
Impressive nonetheless but not quite up to the level of these components.
GTX1080 version has a lot beefier side panels but I would still be sceptical about the abilities of the case.