Futurelooks checks out some cooling gear for today's tiny yet powerful mini ITX systems
Our mini ITX demo system that first appeared at the NCIX Windows 8 Launch Event is quite the conversation piece. Especially once people realize that inside the understated ANTEC ISK300 mini ITX case lies a full desktop Core i7 3770K CPU, two Kingston HyperX 120GB SSDs, 16GBs of HyperX DDR3 LoVo memory, and a discrete AMD HD 5570 low profile GPU all plugged into a GIGABYTE Z77N-WiFi motherboard. The fact that all of this works together fantastically today, without exploding, tells us that mini ITX is ready to become a do it all platform. However, two things still plague small form factor systems in the form of noise and heat.Taming Mini ITX PC Heat and Noise With Noctua’s NH-L9i Low Profile CPU Cooler and NF-R8 80mm PWM Fans
That’s why we’ve asked Noctua to send us over some of their premium cooling products to see if anything could be done about that and they responded. We recently received their brand new NH-L9i low profile CPU cooler for INTEL processors and two of their NF-R8 80mm PWM fans, to see if we could reduce the noise, the temperatures, and ideally, both at the same time.
