First Look: Zotac's AirJet Pico Tiny PC Goes Solid-State to Cool an Intel Core i3

pcmag.com:

TAIPEI—Zotac is no stranger to ultra-tiny PCs. The mini PC maker has been innovating in the space for years, making desktop PCs that will fit into a pants pocket, and fine-tuning them for everything from digital signage and kiosk point-of-sale systems to home theater streaming boxes and super-compact gaming machines. But the latest Zotac mini PC might just be the coolest yet, thanks to a new fanless cooling system we've covered in recent months.

We got a chance to chill out with the new AirJet-equipped Zotac Pico PC at Computex 2023, and what we saw was both breezy and breathtaking.

The Zotac Zbox PI430AJ Pico is far from the first PC the company has made with a form factor that could be mistaken for a wallet or smartphone, but the new model has some new tricks that haven't been possible until now. The big one is the inclusion of AirJet, a fanless active cooling solution from Frore Systems.

The new tech uses slim AirJet cooling chips—thin slivers filled with membranes that use ultrasonic vibration to pull air via suction force through the tunnel-like chip, producing a steady stream of cooling air. Plus, it does this in silence. Providing up to 10 watts of cooling without a spinning fan, it's a major step forward for making these pocketable PCs a lot more powerful.

That cooling tech lets Zotac squeeze more power out of its pocket-size PC by reducing the limits that heat build-up normally imposes on such narrow chassis designs. More to the point, Zotac has leveraged the new cooling tech to allow the Pico to run an Intel Core i3 CPU, which is a big step up from the Celeron chips that Zotac has used in earlier versions of its Pico mini PCs.

Specifically, the Zbox PI430AJ houses an Intel Core i3-N300 eight-core processor that