Zotac’s new Mini PC will hopefully usher in a new era of device cooling

pcgamer.com:

Devices with fan-less cooling are nothing new, however passive cooling is generally restricted to low power devices, while those with higher thermal design power (ie: a gaming PC) require much larger heatsinks. But there's a promising new technology that's making its way to market combining the best of both worlds. This cooling system generates airflow without the need for fans.

Zotac has just released its ZBOX Pico PI430AJ mini PC. I recall seeing it at Computex in late May. It's an otherwise mostly unremarkable mini PC, with a Core i3 N300 processor, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, NVMe SSD support and Zotac's typically good complement of connectivity options. Oh, and it's just 0.21L in size, which isn't much larger than an external SSD. But it's the cooling system that sets it apart.

It's the first mini PC to feature solid state active cooling. It incorporates a technology developed by Frore Systems called AirJet. AirJet is a module that sits atop the processor. It features tiny membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies, which produces pulsating jets of airflow. It's basically an active cooler, without the fans.

A single AirJet module can dissipate 5W of heat. That's not a lot, but vendors can scale that up by adding more than one module.

This technology delivers some obvious benefits. Bye-bye fans! They can get very noisy in ultrathin devices, and they are particularly susceptible to failures. Also, the AirJet module is very thin, at just 2.8mm thick, while weighing only nine grams. That makes it ideally suited to thin and light devices. 

But CPU cooling isn't AirJet's only potential application. Alongside all manner of devices including handhelds, cameras, IoT and networking, it's well suited to NVMe SSD cooling, which