> I remember cooling the early CPUs with simple heatsinks; no fan. Those days are long gone.
Interestingly, for desktop machines, this is not quite correct... there is still a "fanless" movement going. My roommate has a PC that doesn't have any physical moving components: no fans, no hard drives.
Fanless designs are not space-efficient, though; see this fanless CPU heatsink: https://www.quietpc.com/nof-icepipe which is rated for up to a 95W TDP CPU - enough to run an Intel i7-6700K, which has a TDP rating of 91W.
If you're willing to build a very quiet machine instead of a silent machine, liquid cooling with very quiet fans (that eventually ramp up based on temps) is very workable, and means your machine is effectively silent (i.e. at or around ambient noise levels) 99% of the time.
Due to the problems of office noise I needed to solve the problem of being able to work 'at my desktop' but from somewhere quieter in the office, e.g. an unused meeting room.
So I invested in a cheap and cheerful Chromebook, put linux on it (Gallium OS is the easiest operating system to install, ever), got the NFS mounts working, got my desktop to proxy serve my dev domains, put 'Synergy' on there (so I can use the same keyboard/mouse on all machines from the Chromebook) and made sure I could also work fully remote with it too (local repo). I also got 'X Windows' to work nicely.
As a glorified terminal my Chromebook has full HD, massive battery life (all day) and zero noise. In fact I wish it was 'warmer' in use, such is the low-end Celeron's feeble and fanless heat output.
It seems to me that laptops actually do not last the distance if they are over a certain size - 15". The thermal management is just not up to it and it is only a matter of time before the fan is running permanently with the CPU throttled. After a couple of dead laptops one thinks 'desktop/server', somehow silent and low power so it can be left on... But this doesn't really exist unless you invest in silent cooling.
With my bargain basement Chromebook I can do everything I want to do although for some things like a time doing graphics work, I will go to the faster machine. This faster machine no longer has lots of cables attached to it, the keyboard/mouse is shared from the Chromebook so it becomes a box with power in, network and HDMI out, neatly tucked out of sight in an adjacent cupboard rather than roaring away on/under my desk.
Another bonus of the Chromebook is that it's lameness is a feature. People have rubbish computers as well as posh ones, I need to test for all devices and what will work on a low end Chromebook will fly along on anything more normal.
GalliumOS is easy to install, on something that's not a Chromebook perhaps. In order to install it, I had to:
> Put the chromebook into 'developer mode', wiping the hard drive
> Physically open the device, breaking the 'warranty void' sticker, in order to remove a write-protect screw
> Change firmware flags to allow booting off of unsigned partitions
> Replace the firmware entirely, risking bricking the device
Apart from that it was easy, and the installation program was faultless. I do use my Chromebook as a dev machine, and I agree with you that the poor performance is more of a help than a hindrance. Code editors don't stress out any remotely modern computer, and if your code runs well on the Chromebook then it should be fine anywhere else; very few machines have worse specs. I think they're fine machines, and GalliumOS is everything one would wish, but I really couldn't count ease of installation amongst their features.
My hunch is that you opened up a Chromebook Pixel (2013). I thought about it but decided against 'mutilating' the design classic that is the original Pixel, stepped back from the edge and bought an Acer 14" full HD Chromebook with 4Gb RAM for £250.
One thing though - sound. This only works on HDMI which again is a feature - I can't procrastinate with videos. Installing 'WinZip' on a PC back in the day when I used 'Windows' was harder and certainly more fraught with danger.
I didn't realize how massive that heat sink was until I saw the little "how to install" animation at the bottom. It basically occupies the entire case O.O
The heatsinks for fanless designs are enormous, but the result (no moving parts in your PC, if you eschew hard drive(s) as well) is really neat in my opinion, and great if you do audio work - as my roommate does. Totally silent, guaranteed.
You definitely need to plan for it, though. The heatsink doesn't offer enough clearance for some of the taller RAM sticks on some motherboards.
The temps aren't all that bad either. If I remember correctly, my roommate's PC operates at temps that are roughly equivalent to the stock Intel heatsink/cooler. Not the best, but given that it doesn't have a fan, pretty nice.
I don't really understand the allure of going entirely fanless. Adding a couple of fans that spin so slowly they're inaudible makes a huge difference in cooling efficiency, with no real downside. For example, I use one of these.[1] It's several years old, but it does a good job of cooling, can't be heard, and doesn't fill up the whole damn case like that one you linked to... I can only imagine newer heatsink/fan designs are even better.
I don't personally run a fanless build... I use the design I mentioned at the end of my post, liquid cooling with almost silent fans (Noctua brand, like you linked).
The defining feature of a fanless build really is cost. It's hard to build a machine that will stay silent under load for cheaper than the heatsink I linked above. At the same time, fanless builds don't dissipate enough heat to enable high overclocking (so you can't eke out the same performance as you could using fans).
For desktop machines, the biggest challenge is not cooling the CPU, but the GPU, for several reasons:
1. Mid-range cards and higher consume twice as much as a quad-core CPU.
2. Much more vertically constrained (other expansion cards on the bottom) than a CPU, so heatsink designs are very limited
3. Heatsink is much less standardized, partly because of (2), and partly because of different PCB sizes and the fact that is has to cover VRM chips as well.
There are also cases where most of the computer case surface is an actual heat sink and radiator. Heat pipes are provided that you can attach to the processor and graphics card.
A free business idea: create decent looking fanless radiator cases for computers. Make them look like minimalistic furniture, not like kid's toys or faux Apple imitations.
> I remember cooling the early CPUs with simple heatsinks; no fan. Those days are long gone.
Interestingly, for desktop machines, this is not quite correct... there is still a "fanless" movement going. My roommate has a PC that doesn't have any physical moving components: no fans, no hard drives.
Fanless designs are not space-efficient, though; see this fanless CPU heatsink: https://www.quietpc.com/nof-icepipe which is rated for up to a 95W TDP CPU - enough to run an Intel i7-6700K, which has a TDP rating of 91W.
If you're willing to build a very quiet machine instead of a silent machine, liquid cooling with very quiet fans (that eventually ramp up based on temps) is very workable, and means your machine is effectively silent (i.e. at or around ambient noise levels) 99% of the time.