Minisforum fanless NAS up close

The Minisforum PC / NAS is the most beautiful piece of hardware we've seen in a long time. Coming in September, the S5 is powered by an Intel Core Series 3 Wildcat Lake processor, supports up to 16GB of DDR5 RAM and five M.2 SSDs. The headline feature of the machine is of course its completely fanless, all-aluminum chassis, making it quiet enough to sit directly on a nightstand, or in a home theater setup without causing a distraction.

Source: HKEPC 

GEEKOM's first fanless PC

The GEEKOM IX12 is an Intel N95 mini PC engineered with a unique-looking fanless chassis. The compact 5.2 × 5.7 × 2.0" (132.1 × 145 × 52.5 mm) system features quad Intel 2.5G LAN ports, an interesting 5G SIM card slot, five USB ports, HDMI, and DisplayPort. The 8GB / 256GB Windows 11 Pro model is available for $349.

Surprise NUC 16 launched

Out of nowhere, ASUS just announced the NUC 16, a budget-friendly alternative to the NUC 16 Pro. While the Pro version runs on a 25W Panther Lake-H CPU, the standard model scales things back with a power-efficient 15W Wildcat Lake processor. Honestly, we're loving this move. It brings the NUC back to what it used to be: affordable, low-power, and fanless-friendly. The NUC 16 only loses a Thunderbolt 4 port and a couple of USB 3.2 ports compared to the Pro version, while CPU options include the Core 3 Processor 304, Core 5 Processor 320, and Core 7 Processor 350.

Source: Liliputing 

Akasa at COMPUTEX

Akasa is occupying Booth N0329a in the Nangang Exhibition Center, Taipei, showcasing all its fanless chassis, from tiny Raspberry Pi solutions to massive 65W-rated dust proof and waterproof mini-ITX cases. Tell them we sent you!

Update: TechPowerUp just spotted the first fanless NUC 16 Pro case.

Update #2: It's coming very soon (PDF)

Technically fanless

Here's the first prototype of the Ventiva / ASUS NUC. At Computex 2026, Ventiva announced a strategic partnership with ASUS to develop next-generation thermal architectures for compact computing systems. The collaboration focuses on integrating Ventiva’s silent, vibration-free ionic cooling technology into future ASUS NUC and mini-PCs. This ionic cooling moves air without mechanical fans, creating silent, vibration-free airflow. The Ventiva thermal module is comprised of a self-contained air blower device, fin stack, and vapor chamber or heat pipe.

Steampunk experiment N°3

"For the longest time, it's always been my dream to have a completely unique PC. A year or so back I saw Billet Labs release their special telescoping fittings for copper and it immediately inspired me to start planning out how to achieve this build. The goal was to build a completely passive water cooling system. A year or so later and roughly soldering through about 15 meters of 1/2" copper pipe and I'm getting real close to the end of this project."

Source: LTT forum

New fanless motherboard

Web browsing, online shopping, video streaming and even everyday productivity don't demand a powerhouse processor. Meet the new N250-powered ASRock N250M/D5, a Micro ATX solution featuring a single DDR5 DIMM slot, a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot operating in x2 mode, two SATA3 connectors, and a PCIe Gen3x2 M.2 socket, HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, and seven USB ports (including one 3.2 Gen 2 Type C). The only real omission here is a DC power jack. After all, pairing a full-sized ATX power supply with a tiny 6W processor feels like total overkill.

Source: ASRock 

My ultimate HTPC

"The Akasa case is great, albeit a bit larger than I expected. It is a solid chunk of aluminum weighing over 1.5 kilograms. The cooling capacity of the case is better than I expected and better than the original NUC case with a fan. With the original NUC case setup the idle temperature was often around 100 F degrees and could hit over 130 F degrees which kicked in the fan noise. With the new Akasa case the idle temperature is around 83 F degrees and around 100 F degrees during high bitrate playback, even with MPEG2 files which I am not using HW decoding. Many times it remains under 90 degrees during playback. The external antennas perform far better than the stock NUC setup. I can see my neighbor's WiFi SSIDs from over 100 ft away with a moderate signal level."

Source: LibreELEC 

ODROID-H5 hands on

"It’s fanless and cooled by a large and thick heatsink, and most ports can be found on the rear panel: 12V DC jack, two USB 2.0 ports, a 10GbE RJ45, two USB 3.0 ports, one HDMI port, and two DisplayPort connectors. A look at the top shows one of the M.2 PCIe Gen3 x2 sockets (SSD2), an eMMC module slot, Power and Reset buttons, an RTC battery connector, a 4-pin 12V fan connector, and a 24-pin GPIO header. The bottom side features a single SO-DIMM connector and three more M.2 sockets. Note that SSD1 and SSD3 are PCIe Gen3 x2 sockets, but SSD4 is only connected to one PCIe Gen3 lane, so that’s something to keep in mind when connecting modules."

Source: CNX Software 

Panther Lake-H KUBB

The French-designed mini PC measuring just 12 by 12 centimeters and featuring an eye-catching heatsink case is now powered by the new Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor. The system is fully configurable with up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage. The KUBB Fanless is available from 1850€.

https://kubb.eu/en/4-mini-pc-kubb-fanless.html