january 2016 - compulab, a maker of miniature and small form-factor computers, is introducing its first desktop system called airtop today. the new computer can be equipped with rather high-performance components, but is completely fanless and only uses the company’s proprietary natural air-flow (naf) cooling technology.

compulab’s airtop is a compact 7.5-liter desktop system that can dissipate up to 200w of heat using only passive cooling methods. the airtop utilizes various industry-standard components and can be configured as a gaming pc, a server or a workstation. the system is based on a proprietary motherboard featuring intel’s c226 platform controller hub (pch) designed specifically for the airtop with naf cooling. the mainboard places cpu socket, dimm slots, pci express x16 slot and other components in a way to enable the most efficient dissipation of heat. to eliminate hot components from the case, the airtop uses an external psu with a mini-din connector.

the proprietary airtop mainboard is compatible with intel core i7 and intel xeon e3 v4 microprocessors based on intel’s haswell or broadwell micro-architectures (lga1150 packaging) as well as various graphics cards, including nvidia’s geforce gtx 950 and quadro m4000.

the compulab airtop is available as a pre-configured system or as a barebone sff pc for diy enthusiasts. since the system is unique and uses numerous components designed specifically for the airtop, it naturally is not affordable. the airtop barebone costs $1128, the airtop-s passively-cooled server (featuring the intel xeon e3-1285l v4 cpu) starts at $1810, the airtop-g gaming pc (with the intel core i7-5775c and the nvidia geforce gtx 950 graphics card) is priced at $1968, whereas the airtop-w workstation (with intel’s xeon e3-1285l v4 chip and nvidia’s quadro m4000 graphics adapter) costs $2999. the systems will be available in q1 2016.