"While I've been very happy with my staking rig, an ASUS PN50 with a Ryzen 4300U, I recently came across the Akasa Newton A50, a third-party case which claims to improve cooling and eliminate noise.
Btw I had no real complaints with noise, my rig was fairly quiet, but the fans would whir up occasionally which was sometimes annoying as the rig is located in my apartment, so I thought, lemme give this upgrade a go.
The Akasa is basically just a heavy, fanless, heatsink, and performs very well. It's quite small, only slightly larger than the PN50. I'd say the Akasa is maybe 1/3rd the size of a shoebox.
The whole upgrade took me probably 2 hours, to dismantle the PN50, and transfer the motherboard, CPU, SSD, and RAM.
Pros:
- My rig is now DEAD SILENT. It's actually kind of amazing having no noise whatsoever.
- Much better cooling performance than stock. Temps are 12-15 degrees lower across the board. I imagine this should also help eliminating any CPU thermal throttling (if you had been experiencing any), and my SSD runs a lot cooler as the Akasa included a beefy M2 SSD heatsink.
- Compatible with all variants of the ASUS PN50 (4300U, 4500U, 4700U, 4800U) as well as all variants of the PN51 (5300U, 5500U, 5700U).
Cons:
- You have to dismantle the PN50 / PN51 and I personally found it incredibly difficult pulling the motherboard out of the ASUS PN50 in particular. I had to actually bend and break pieces of the case off to get the mobo out, destroying the original case in the process. But after that, installation in the Akasa was straight forward. I looked this issue up online and supposedly the PN50 was slightly redesigned internally at one point, hence why some people do not have this problem but others do. Or something.
- The LED is the only thing that tells me it's running. But it's kinda bright.
- You WILL need to have additional thermal paste on hand. They don't give you enough in the kit.
Summary:
- Totally worth it."
Source: reddit
