How Does a Fanless PC Work?

If you’re familiar with how a typical fanned computer stays cool, you’re already halfway to understanding the cooling magic behind a fanless PC. While traditional PCs rely on fans to move air across heat-generating components, fanless PCs achieve the same goal using passive cooling through natural convection or conduction techniques. Our fanless computers are also often designed without vents, a crucial feature for contaminated environments. In many industrial settings, the air is filled with dust, debris, and other contaminants that can infiltrate traditional PCs, damaging sensitive circuits and reducing reliability. By sealing the chassis completely and relying on passive cooling methods such as natural convection or conduction, our fanless PCs remain protected from environmental hazards, ensuring long-term performance and durability even in the harshest conditions. By integrating advanced cooling technologies and sealing the chassis, fanless PCs ensure consistent performance at the edge with little to no maintenance, eliminating common points of failure in embedded and industrial applications.

Passive cooling is a method of dissipating heat without the use of fans or other active components. This approach is at the core of fanless PCs, which are designed to operate silently and reliably by eliminating moving parts. Unlike traditional actively cooled computers that rely on fans to move air over a CPU, GPU, and even high-speed NVMe SSDs, a fanless computer utilises a solid-state design with advanced thermal management strategies to ensure effective cooling. Central to this process are heatsinks, which play a crucial role in transferring heat away from the computer’s internal components, using thermal paste or thermal pads to ensure efficient thermal conductivity. The heatsink absorbs the heat produced during operation and then transfers it to the chassis of the fanless PC. The chassis of a fanless computer is designed to function as an extended heatsink, made primarily from thermally conductive aluminium. For high-performance computing applications, copper heat pipes are frequently integrated into the chassis walls to enhance heat transfer and distribute heat more effectively. The aluminium chassis typically features fins or ridges, which increase surface area and promote heat dissipation through natural convection.

The above industrial fanless PC employs several advanced passive cooling techniques, including a double-layer heatsink with a chimney effect, double-sided copper heat pipes, and liquid metal thermal interface for its high-performance components, such as the 45W AMD Ryzen CPU, DDR5 memory, NVMe SSD, and network interface card, to prevent hotspots. This design achieves a 1.7x improvement in convection cooling, ensuring reliable performance even under heavy workloads.