Temperatures

Akasa advertises their passive NUC chassis as achieving better cooling results than the Intel stock unit with a fan. We checked temperatures in idle and under load. The unit was first left to sit at the Windows desktop on a default Windows7 installation for thirty minutes before idle numbers were collected. The system was then put under load by creating a 100% load on the CPU, using FurMark for the GPU and benchmarking the SSD all at the same time. This test was run for thirty minutes as well, and all its numbers were, once again, recorded.


In idle, the CPU is noticeably cooler in the Akasa Newton than the stock Intel solution. This is particularly impressive because the Newton does so without the use of a fan. The Newton is only two degrees hotter than the Tranquil PC chassis in idle, and four degrees hotter at full load. The Newton's performance is then more than adequate given Akasa's offering costs nearly 1/3rd that of the Tranquil PC variant.


The trend continues as we take a look at the GPU. Here, the Newton once again manages to keep things cooler than Intel's stock unit, and it is only three degrees behind the Tranquil PC case under load—still offering a massive 14°C advantage over Intel's actively cooled NUC solution.


Temperatures of the motherboard are between 6°C and 12°C lower than the default offering, and the Newton is only 2°C-4°C warmer than the more expensive Tranquil PC variant in idle and load.


Last but not least, there is the Intel 180GB mSATA SSD. There is virtually no difference while the system is sitting at the Windows desktop as all three solutions are within 2°C of one another, but the gap widens once the entire system, including the SSD, is put under load. The Akasa Newton does a good job by being 7°C cooler than Intel's enclosure, but Tranquil PC's solution manages to push temperatures down even further by being 4°C cooler than the Newton.