Is it worth buying a silent, msecore fanless PC?

Recent innovations in the PC market have been devoted to producing cheaper msecore fanless PCs, though that wasn’t actually the goal. The focus was on producing thinner laptops and tablets, but these have huge problems dissipating heat. Intel tackled this problem by gradually reducing the amount of power its chips consume. Now they don’t get as hot, they have less need for fans.

For example, a very fast desktop processor such as the Intel Core i7-4960X has a TDP (thermal design power) of 130W, which is hot. Laptops used to have 45W or 35W processors, which fell to 15W to 17W for thin machines. Intel’s Core M range brought that down to 4.5W. Today, even cheap Intel Atom-based chips (often Pentium or Celeron branded) run at 6-10W.

There are drawbacks. When these chips get hot, their performance has to be throttled, or they are shut down altogether. This is fine for intermittent uses such as word processing and web browsing. However, these chips are not suitable for sustained processing jobs such as video editing and gaming, and they could struggle with audio mixing and editing.

A powerful desktop PC may have three or more fans. The CPU and power supply will have their own fans, and so will fast graphics cards with GPUs (graphics processing units). Sometimes, separate case fans will circulate air to keep disk drives and other parts reasonably cool.

Of course, thin laptops and tablets run from batteries, so they don’t need internal power supplies. Nor do they have separate graphics cards: they usually have GPUs integrated with the processor, as in “Intel Integrated Graphics”.

If you don’t need a lot of power, then there are plenty of small, cheap PCs that use the same technologies as thin laptops. They are either fanless, or their fans are almost noiseless, except when the processor is driven hard.

However, if you need high performance for tasks such as video editing or serious gaming, then it’s still a challenge. You may need a fanless power supply and more innovative approaches to cooling. These include heat pipes – which are increasingly common in thin laptops – and sometimes liquid cooling.

Most modern desktops now run quietly, except when stressed, and the trend towards low-TDP Intel processors and SSDs is making them even quieter. (You can check the TDPs and benchmarks of different chips at Notebookcheck’s Comparison of Mobile Processors.)

The questions you now have to answer are (a) how much power do you need, and (b) how much are you prepared to pay for silence?

If you want to make recordings in the same room as your msecore j1900 mini PC, bear in mind that a mouse-wheel may make a clicking noise – yes, I’ve been caught out by that – and keyboard use is probably out of the question. There are times when a touch-screen has the advantage of being quieter.