The original fanless computer

Fanless Mac mini DIY

Fine, it's just an empty Mac mini case, but still. We're manifesting a passively-cooled desktop computer from Apple, hopefully it will happen sooner or later. In this rudimentary build, the Braswell pico motherboard is attached to a thick 400g copper plaque and mounted to the aluminum chassis. Enough to keep the 6W Celeron N3160 from throttling, even under heavy load.

Source: Chiphell

Coolest fanless hackintosh

"I saw the Noctua NH-P1 and it looked cool and so I thought I would give it a go. I paid 110 Euro which is not cheap but much cheaper than a Mac Studio. Taking all the measurements, everything looked possible. I blowtorched the fins off the original heat sink leaving a flat surface to rest the Noctua on. When it arrived I placed it on top and found the right orientation. I thought for a while on how to keep it fixed in place bearing in mind that it weighs over 1kg. After a bit of fiddling I was successful and the result, in my opinion, was perfect. It now runs silently and extremely cool knocking more than 20 C off of the stock cooling system. Idle temps are 35 C in ambient room temperature of 30 C. Maxes out at 60 C after 20 mins of endurance. Is it overkill? Yes. Do I love it. Yes."

Source: Frank Lacey 

a Mac mini ACTUALLY mini (and fanless)

Courtesy of Snazzy Labs

Silent Mac Pro coming soon?

Is a new passively-cooled Mac coming later this year? Following a previous Bloomberg article teasing a larger M1 Mac mini that would invoke nostalgia for the Power Mac G4 Cube, Jon Prosser is alluding to a machine that looks like three to four Mac minis stacked on top of each other. Also, the phrase "compute unit on the bottom with a big heat sink on top" is like music to our ears, and sounds like a perfectly designed fanless computer. We strongly believe in solid state computing, and Apple could lead the way once again.

Source: FRONT PAGE TECH 

The weirdest hackintosh

Arctic's Alpine AM4 Passive is designed for AMD's 35W desktop processors but looks amazing paired with Intel's Bean Canyon NUC. We're curious to know how mounting works here, though.

Source: reddit

Update: "What I did: use the existing mounting holes of the mainboard: 95mm in one direction, 90,50mm in the other direction apart from another. Arctic AM4 passive has 99x99mm, so I just drilled 4 1,5mm holes in the appropriate places, threaded 2M threads into each hole and screwed the AM4 from the bottom. Heat is transferred via a thin copper plate which is glued to the stock heatsink and from there via standard thermal grease to the bottom of the cooler." (Thanks Parke!)

Could Mac mini go fanless?

In a nutshell, yes. Current Mac mini features the aging Core i5-4260U (15W TDP, 3523 average CPU Mark). A slower chip than the current Skylake Core m7-6Y75 (4.5W TDP, 3565 average CPU Mark).

No doubt that the new 4.5W Kaby Lake Y-series will improve performance even more. If Chinese Mac mini copycats can passively-cool 6W processors without any problem, what is Apple waiting for?

Will Apple go fanless?

Apple will likely unveil Haswell-based Macs this month. Is passive cooling in the cards?

Music producers, content creators, and overall silence freaks would certainly approve, but ditching fans would require some drastic design changes. Even a fanless 35W processor would make iMacs so much thicker. We're not sure Apple would compromise the Mac mini performance with a 15W or 11.5W SoC either.

Still, let's not forget Apple's ability to innovate and lead the industry. Fingers crossed.

Fanless Mac mini

The last mainstream fanless computer was Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube in 2000. Given Intel's upcoming low power Haswell chips, Apple could definitely release a new passive Mac in 2013. Some didn't bother to wait...

Source: My-hiend.com

Big changes ahead ?

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple is considering dropping Intel's processors in favor of its own ARM-based SOCs.

For now a niche market, fanless computers could become the norm. Very. Exciting.

Source: Engadget