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You can build a fanless x64 PC quite easily: 4-core Intel Silvermont/Goldmont or AMD Ryzen Embedded V and R series can be passively cooled. Many of those ITX bo

You can build a fanless x64 PC quite easily: 4-core Intel Silvermont/Goldmont or AMD Ryzen Embedded V and R series can be passively cooled. Many of those ITX boards come with a 19V DC-Jack power-in so you can use a laptop power brick and eliminate the PSU fan as well. Fujitsu used to have some nice designs, I think now it's owned by Kontron. Asrock also has a good selection for more retail-oriented products. Of course you can also passively cool a full-fledged desktop CPU if you want but that's a different category in terms of price and performance so I am not talking about that. As for power, I have Puma-based x64 4-core boards that idle at 5W and consume 12W at full load (measured at the wall). Goldmont should be similarly efficient. RPi4 is about 7W at load I think. Not a huge difference.

w0utert 5y ago
Yeah, you can even go back much further in time if you're not too worried about performance. I've been running a fanless Atom J1900 based mini-PC as a home server for ~8 years nonstop now. It's trivial to build such a system but at least back then the cost was literally 10x to 20x the price of a rPI today. I would guess that even though it's an 8-year old CPU it's probably about 2x as fast as an rPI 4B, and for something that's been chugging along for all this time the cost/depreciation over time vs. a much cheaper rPI isn't really an issue for me.
type0 5y ago
Lenovo has ThinkEgde with passive cooling, not sure how price to performance compares there.
throwaway894345 5y ago
No doubt x86 can be passively cooled, but presumably that means giving up the competitive price point that the OP mentioned with respect to the chip and mobo?
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y ago
  That carrier board doesn't seem to have a price yet, but if you don't mind buying used (and saving some perfectly capable devices from becoming e-waste at the same time) you can usually get a second-hand thin client for the price of the RPi CM module alone.

w0utert 5y ago

Yeah, you can even go back much further in time if you're not too worried about performance. I've been running a fanless Atom J1900 based mini-PC as a home server for ~8 years nonstop now. It's trivial to build such a system but at least back then the cost was literally 10x to 20x the price of a rPI today. I would guess that even though it's an 8-year old CPU it's probably about 2x as fast as an rPI 4B, and for something that's been chugging along for all this time the cost/depreciation over time vs. a much cheaper rPI isn't really an issue for me.

type0 5y ago

Lenovo has ThinkEgde with passive cooling, not sure how price to performance compares there.

throwaway894345 5y ago

No doubt x86 can be passively cooled, but presumably that means giving up the competitive price point that the OP mentioned with respect to the chip and mobo?

puzzlingcaptcha 5y ago
That carrier board doesn't seem to have a price yet, but if you don't mind buying used (and saving some perfectly capable devices from becoming e-waste at the same time) you can usually get a second-hand thin client for the price of the RPi CM module alone.