[OT] The coolest (literally) desktop machine I've ever had

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

I was using a large Lenovo Y70-70 laptop as a pseudo-desktop machine and 
additional monitor. It's quite powerful, but its fans would run at all 
times. Getting really tired of that, I googled for the better part of an 
afternoon for "fanless desktop" and it turns out it's much harder to 
find one than I'd initially thought. (Slow fanless machines are easy to 
find, but I was looking for one as powerful as any desktop.)

At about the time I was ready to give up I found an obscure site of an 
Israeli company that claimed to make a real i7 fanless machine. It was 
releases very recently, too, so I'm thinking it might be of interest to 
some others.

So I got it from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CP4S15E. I fitted 
it with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. It's more expensive than a traditional 
desktop of the same configuration, but as soon as you turn it on, you 
know where that extra money went. (Speaking of money, ironically, the 
extra expenditure has had an unexpected return: I occasionally daytrade, 
and when I do I need CNBC on. That made the laptop's fans make even more 
noise than usual, so I was avoiding it. Nowadays I can keep CNBC on no 
problem, which allowed me to handily cover the extra expense.)

I've put Linux Mint on it (which is what they recommend) and it works 
swimmingly. The handling of multiple desktops is just awesome. The one 
thing I don't like about the machine is it always powers the discrete 
graphics card, which I don't use. Their engineers (who've been very 
active to respond to my emailed questions) said a future BIOS upgrade 
will allow powering off the card.

Thought this might help others looking for a fanless dekstop.


Andrei