Recycled Thermalright Shaman

Launched in 2010, Thermalright's Shaman was a massive GPU cooler featuring an impressive array of 8 heat pipes and weighting 500g. Initially designed for GTX460 / 470 / 480 and HD5870 / 5850 / 4870 / 4850, our friend Axel made it LGA1151 compatible. And it didn't disappoint.

Even after 45 minutes of Prime95, the Shaman is able to work its magic and keep the 54W Pentium G4560 at bay (the Kaby Lake processor never reaching much more than 75°C). Contact the modder at axel dot france at gmail dot com.

Budget Coffee Lake build

Convection is the main mantra of passive cooling. With vents on the top (and mesh panels) the Cooler Master Elite 110 will provide enough fresh air for natural convection to occur.

Add a highly capable and hyperthreaded Pentium G5500T (35W TDP), Arctic's Alpine 11 Passive CPU cooler, ASUS H310T Thin mini-ITX motherboard (with DC power), a compatible 150W FSP adapter, 8GB of Crucial memory, a trusty 500GB Samsung SSD, and here's your $450 fanless Coffee Lake PC.

The Sigao solution

Atlast! Solutions has written a blog article explaining the problem they encountered with the i7-8700T. It could not be used as a "like for like" replacement in fanless cases suited to the previous i7-7700T. They found that the default settings would cause the i7-8700T to use up to 50W CPU power instead of the advertised 35W. Read the article here.

The solution can be to manually set the maximum power (TDP) for the CPU in the motherboard BIOS settings. The downsides to this are:

1) This causes the CPU to throttle performance after about 30 seconds from 38x clock multiplier down to 32x when heavily loading the CPU with multi-core activity.

2) The customer needs to manually set the TDP values if they updated the BIOS or if it was reset. Although not a problem for enthusiasts, this is not a suitable strategy for a product sold to the general marketplace.

The good news is that the 8th Generation 6-core i5 CPUs use less power / heat and have performance at similar levels to the previous i7 CPUs (these are available in a range of fanless PCs featuring Streacom, Akasa, and Impactics cases).

A new industrial grade "Sigao" fanless PC range featuring a case made of 7 Kg of aluminium and steel is able to keep the mighty i7-8700T cool (even under heavy load). Sigao is now their flagship product.

Fanless Dawson Canyon NUC shipping now

One of the rare passively-cooled Dawson Canyon NUC is available from FanlessTech's partner Logic Supply. The solid-state computer is rocking Intel's i3-7100U, i5-7300U or i7-8650U and is fully-configurable in terms of memory, storage, and OS (Ubuntu is available). Highly reliable, and highly recommended. Prices start at $620.

Second Coffee Lake Thin Mini-ITX motherboard

We saw it briefly at COMPUTEX, GIGABYTE's own Thin mini-ITX motherboard for Intel's Coffee Lake processors is now official. Unlike its predecessor, GIGABYTE thankfully did not stick the usually hot M.2 SSD to the chipset. Two Intel GbE LAN are also very much appreciated. Overall, a fantastic option for Akasa Euler / Euler S / Euler TX builds.

✓ 2 x SO-DIMM DDR4
✓ 1 x M.2 socket
✓ 2 x SATA 6Gb/s
✓ 2 x USB 2.0 ports
✓ 2 x USB 3.0 ports
✓ 1 x HDMI
✓ 1 x DisplayPort
✓ 2 x Gigabit LAN

Source: GIGABYTE, gdm.or.jp

Kaby Lake ZBOX on clearance

Rocking Intel's i3-7100U and i5-7200U the diminutive barebones feature possibly the best connectivity on small PCs ever. No less than five USB 3.0, two USB 3.1, DisplayPort, HDMI, and a SD card reader. Both models also feature dual LAN ports. The ZBOX CI527 is now available for $280 while the ZBOX CI547 retails for $390.

First fanless Ryzen mini PC

Tranquil PC is back. The UK-based company - creator of the first commercially available fanless NUC case 5 years ago - launches a gorgeous mini PC rocking sub-25W Ryzen Embedded SoCs in a 180mm (7.08”) x 157mm (6.18”) x 54mm (2.12”) CNC-milled aluminum chassis.

Also featured are dual Gigabit LAN, four USB ports, and four DisplayPorts since AMD's V1000 series can power four independent 4K / HDR displays. Three models can be pre-ordered today, at surprisingly good prices.

✓ Mini Multi display PC - Basic (AMD Ryzen Embedded V1202B, 2C/4T up to 3.2GHz, 8GB DDR4, 250GB M.2 SSD)

✓ Mini Multi display PC - Advance (AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B, 4C/8T up to 3.6GHz, 16GB DDR4, 250GB M.2 SSD)

✓ Mini Multi display PC - Advance+ (AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B, 4C/8T up to 3.6GHz, 32GB DDR4, 1TB M.2 SSD)

35W Ryzen APUs available

Early adopters of the Alpine AM4 Passive rejoice. The much-coveted Ryzen 3 2200GE with Radeon Vega 8 Graphics (4C/4T @ 3.6GHz) and Ryzen 5 2400GE with Radeon RX Vega 11 Graphics (4C/8T @ 3.8GHz) are finally available from Quiet PC.

But there is a catch: quantities are extremely limited (less than 20 units at press time). Please note that these are OEM / tray processors, and don't come in AMD's retail box.

Source: Quiet PC

Win 3 PrimeMini 3

Another giveaway from Prime Computer, this time to win not one but three elegant fanless NUCs. The PrimeMini 3 is a complete system featuring an i3-6100U, 8GB RAM, a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD, and Windows 10 Home.

Simply head to https://primecomputer.ch/en/lottery/ and apply before August 30th 2018.

BEAN CANYON priced aggressively

The turbocharged Coffee Lake NUCs are priced at only $299 (i3-8109U), $399 (i5-8259U) and $499 (i7-8559U). All models feature 28W processors and Intel's Iris Plus Graphics 655, good enough for light gaming and crisp 4K visuals. Stay tuned for potential third-party chassis.

Source: Intel