Intel NUC11TNBi5 and Akasa Newton TN Fanless Case Assessment: Silencing the Tiger

Intel’s Tiger Lake-based NUCs have been delivery for effectively over a yr now. 4 product traces have been deliberate initially – Panther Canyon for the mainstream market, Tiger Canyon for the skilled / enterprise market, Phantom Canyon for gaming fans, and the Elk Bay Compute Factor for embedded functions. Provide chain challenges have been impacting availability of various fashions in several areas, however that has not prevented Intel’s companions from delivering complementary merchandise.

Akasa is a well known producer of thermal options for computing programs focusing on industrial functions in addition to residence customers. They’ve been sustaining a lineup of passively-cooled circumstances for Intel’s NUCs since 2013. We had reviewed their Turing case for the Bean Canyon NUC a few years again, and are available away pleasantly shocked. Not typically can we see a fanless case managing to maintain the processor cooler than an actively-cooled answer for a similar workload, however that’s precisely what the Akasa Turing achieved. For Intel’s Tiger Canyon NUCs, Akasa carries three foremost merchandise – Newton TN, Plato TN, and Turing TN. The corporate sampled us the Newton TN for assessment with Intel’s pattern of the NUC11TNKi5.

On the Tiger Lake UCFF entrance, we had reviewed solely a few programs – the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 final yr, and extra just lately, the Supermicro SYS-E100-12T-H. We took the Akasa Newton TN assessment alternative to additionally carry out an in depth analysis of Intel’s personal providing – the NUC11TNKi5 Tiger Canyon NUC. The assessment beneath introduces the Tiger Canyon NUC {hardware} and particulars the construct course of for its fanless model utilizing the Akasa Newton TN earlier than going into the standard platform evaluation. Following this, the benchmark numbers for the passively cooled configuration are in contrast in opposition to the unique NUC11TNKi5 (together with a bunch of different programs). Lastly, outcomes from the thermal analysis of the fanless system are offered. Collectively, these present an concept of what Tiger Lake can ship in a fairly compact fanless system and likewise whether or not the Newton TN manages to copy the success of the Turing.

Introduction and Product Impressions

Intel’s Tiger Lake processors introduced the Willow Cove microarchitecture fabricated in a fairly mature 10nm course of to the market final yr. The main target was primarily on the cellular market, however the firm did launch a set of mini-PCs primarily based on them final yr. The corporate segments the Tiger Lake-based mini-PCs them into totally different classes – Efficiency, Professional, Fanatic, and Excessive. The NUC11 Professional Package NUC11TNKi5 (Tiger Canyon) we’re taking a look at at the moment is a UCFF answer that locations a 100mm x 100mm motherboard inside a 117mm x 112mm x 37mm chassis. The board comes with a soldered processor – the Core i5-1135G7. Belonging to the Tiger Lake-U household, it could possibly function over a spread of configurable TDPs – from 12W to 28W. The NUC’s default BIOS settings set the PL1 (sustained) and PL2 (burst mode) ranges to 28W and 64W respectively, with the PL1 Time Window set to twenty-eight seconds.

Finish-users have the pliability to decide on their very own storage machine and RAM. For finest efficiency, a PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD can be utilized, and DDR4-3200 SODIMMs are supported. Our NUC11TNKi5 pattern got here with the next parts pre-installed:

• Samsung SSD 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD
• 2x Kingston ValueRAM KVR32S22D8/16 DDR4-3200 SODIMM for 32GB of DRAM

The system is actively cooled, with a blower fan on the underside, away from the aspect of the motherboard with the SODIMM and M.2 slots.

The specs of our Intel NUC11TNKi5 assessment configuration are summarized within the desk beneath.

The NUC bundle consists of the standard VESA mount and screws together with an integration information. A region-specific energy wire accompanies the 120W (19V @ 6.32A) adapter.

The gallery beneath offers an summary of the package’s chassis and the I/O distribution. The important thing variations when in comparison with the Efficiency line of Tiger Lake NUCs (Panther Canyon) are the absence of a SDXC card reader, a HDMI 2.0b port as a substitute of a mini-DP port, an additional USB 3.2 Gen 2 Kind-A port within the entrance panel, and the restriction of Thunderbolt Kind-C ports solely to the rear panel.

In comparison with the Efficiency line, the NUC11 Professional line provides official assist for Linux and Window IoT, helps operation over a wider DC enter voltage vary, has an additional inner SSD slot (M.2 2242 SATA / PCIe 3.0 x1), vPro capabilities in choose SKUs, and an extended product life cycle.

The usual NUC11TNKi5 package above can be utilized in most situations, however there could also be use-cases that require the entire absence of any shifting elements. In industrial deployments, the explanation could also be the necessity to keep away from efficiency loss on account of cooling effectivity degradation ensuing from mud build-up. For skilled creators, it could be as a result of must keep away from extraneous noise affecting the work output. The typical residence shopper might also choose a silent system to raised concentrate on the work at hand. For HTPCs, multimedia content material may be loved with out distractions – a facet that could be of paramount significance to audiophiles.

Historically, passively cooled computing programs have both been woefully underpowered for basic objective use, or carried a major premium by way of each value and bodily footprint. Nonetheless, developments in compute efficiency per watt and novel passive cooling chassis designs (that don’t value an arm and a leg to mass-produce) have mixed to offer customers the power to create highly effective, but inexpensive, fanless programs. That is the place distributors like Akasa are available. For the NUC11TNBi5 (the board contained in the NUC11TNKi5 package), Akasa has three totally different circumstances, with dimensions that may fulfill just about any deployment situation:

• Newton TN [ 176.6mm x 200mm x 53.6mm ]
• Plato TN [ 247mm x 240mm x 38.5mm ]
• Turing TN [ 95mm x 113.5mm x 247.9mm ]

We put the usual package by our benchmarking course of first. Following that, we disassembled the unit, and transferred the board to the Akasa Newton TN. The identical benchmarks have been processed once more on the Newton construct.

Previous to analyzing the NUC11 platform and searching on the comparative specs of the thought of programs, we take a deep dive into the construct course of utilizing the Akasa Newton TN.