Hello,
I’m in the (never ending) process of looking for a good/reliable fanless PC to act as
- internet gateway / firewall / web server…
- bhyve / jail host
- occasional workstation
I’ve seen some nice boxes:
- ZBOX nano (Zotac)
- ASUS NUC 13 Rugged
- Vault Pro VP4600 Series (protectli)
Have you some experience with those brands / model?
Are those durable?
My current fanless PC seems immortal: bought in 2013 and still running super great, but it lacks few CPU cores to handle the evolution of my usage.
(edit)
target is:
- 16 to 32GB RAM
- at least 2 storage "slots"
- virtualization support with pass-through
- at least 2 Eth ports (2.5GB is a bonus)
I don't know if you would be interested in the kind of system I use but it's a fairly powerful fanless system I use as my daily driver.
It's a 12-core AMD Ryzen CPU-based system that has integrated AMD Radeon graphics - this means you have an extra 16 PCIe lanes not being used by a graphics card which allows you to install more cards etc.
There appear to be two approaches to fanless systems that I've seen:
1. small devices that effectively use the case as a big heatsink
2. larger cases (Mini-ITX / ATX etc) that are larger and use a massive CPU heatsink.
My system uses a larger case with a massive heatsink. I have a fan installed but it is not connected yet, as I have never needed it so far, but that may change once I start doing long compiles etc.
Specs:
Asus PRIME mini-ITX case
MSI PRO B650M A-WIFI motherboard (although only one 2.5Gb NIC provided)
AMD Ryzen 9 7900 12-core CPU with integrated GPU (12 core, 24 threads) ~65W TDP / ~88W PPT
32GB Corsair Vengeance memory
Noctua NH-P1 CPU heatsink (fanless)
Seasonic 500W fanless PSU
All NVMe SSDs have heatsinks attached but no fans and seem to run cool enough.
I run a 3-way mirror NVMe M.2 SSD ZFS pool on this on a 4-slot NVMe M.2 SSD expansion card which uses the x16 PCIe slot and converts into four x4 NVMe slots via bifurcation in the BIOS.
I have also installed a 2-way SSD ZFS mirror as a handy internal backup target (other external backups too).
Plus I have 2 NVMe M.2 SSDs as boot drives for (1) FreeBSD and (2) Linux.
In total the system contains 5 NVMe M.2 SSDs and 2 standard SSDs. No spinning rust included.
At idle, with this hardware, it pulls between 30W and 40W at the socket, verified by the Kill-a-Watt style plug device. Of course, this increases once you do something.
Idle temps are about 45C.
All in all, I am delighted with how this system performs: 100% silent as there are zero fans in the case, super fast CPU when required, yet just sips power when it is idle and runs cool. Plus I have the power of ZFS for data integrity.