Company launches Kickstarter for passively cooled PC with i7-7700K and GTX 1080
Compulab, an Israeli company that has long made passively cooled PCs, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for its latest PC, a fully passively cooled gaming-focused computer with an Intel Core i7-7700K and a GeForce GTX 1080.
The Airtop2 Inferno should be able to cool the powerful components through a system of hollow air pipes in the side ribs. Cool air is sucked in here by natural convection at the bottom, inside the heat is released from the system and the warm air escapes again from the top. There is no fan in it, not even for the power supply. Videos of how the system should work can be seen on the Kickstarter page.
Where the original Airtop2 still had 200 watts of cooling capacity, this Inferno variant should be able to dissipate the 300+ watts of heat from these parts. In fact, the improved cooling should keep the new parts cooler than the Airtop2 could with its parts. Compulab doesn’t explicitly state it, but it seems they state that the components under load won’t do thermal throttling. The PC must operate in ambient temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius. Both the CPU and GPU are unlocked, the company says.
Compulab has released many more products in its 12-year history, but is still launching a Kickstarter campaign for this computer because they want to make sure there is enough interest in this particular product. They state that the research & development phase has already been completed.
The Airtop2 Inferno has a self-designed Intel C236 motherboard and has a maximum of 64GB of DDR4-2400 RAM on board. There is also room for 6 storage media, of which 2 m.2 and 4 2.5″ SATA drives. Of the 9 USB ports, 7 are USB 3.0 and 2 USB 3.1. There is also a double Gigabit Ethernet, audio ports for and at the back, m.2 connections for WiFi and 4G adapters and an OLED screen on the front that shows temperatures and load. The complete specs are on another webpage. In the future, Compulab also says it will adapt newer GPUs for compatibility with the case Kits with a new motherboard and CPU should also come in the future.
The system has 11 liters of capacity and the cabinet is 15 cm wide, 30 cm high and 25.5 cm deep. The whole weighs 9 kilograms. At the time of writing, just over a sixth of the $300,000 goal has been raised, with 28 days to go. For $ 2480, users have the cheapest variant, where they still have to provide working memory, storage media and an os. For $7478, a user has all the bells and whistles: 64GB of RAM, two 1TB NVME SSDs, four 2TB HDDs, AC WiFi, and more.