SOUND ON SOUND

[Chromeman]

I'm thinking of moving to a fanless PC because I record far more acoustic stuff these days and my 2008 Cheesegrater Mac is feeling its age and is quite noisy in my small space. I noticed on the Scan website and in Youtube vids that a combination of a i7 NUC and an Akasa Turing case seems pretty powerful and silent. Anybody using this combination and would it work as a DAW - can't see why not but thought I'd at least ask the question.

[Pete Kaine]

All the models it lists as compatible are low powered "U" series NUC's, which are the chips you find in netbooks and low power laptop setups and I wouldn't tend to advise them in a laptop for music,

[Agharta]

On the CPU front it depends on how much grunt you need and what are the sustained clock speeds when using a fanless system.
The latest NUCs due soon range up to 6 cores but as they are still using an old fabrication node the power efficiency isn't going to be great.
Have you seen a review of the fanless chassis and how it copes with a quad core under a sustained load?
Even though the TDP can still be as low as 15W, under load it will consume a lot more which makes fanless a problem as the CPU will be thermally throttled.

This is some info on the next generation:
https://hothardware.com/news/intel-nuc-comet-lake-u

My full size desktop is silent with a 6 core at 3.9GHz, so if you have the space it's easier to cool silently when you can accommodate large heat sinks and large slow moving silent fans.

[Chromeman]

Thanks for the replies, that's very helpful. I think I'll look at a proper desktop solution instead.