Look Ma, No Fans: Case Passively Dissipates 700W of Heat
Steacom’s Computex 2023 booth boasted a pleasant concentration, with only four major products on display. Exhibited: SG10 (Passive) Gaming Case, VU1 Dynamic Analog Dial, FF1 Small Form Factor (SFF) Case, and ZS800 Hybrid SFX PSU. We highlight the excellent SG10, which can cool heat loads up to 700 W without the use of fans. Plus, we’ll take a look at the features and attractions of the new VU1 e-Ink display dial.
The Streacom SG10 has been under development for quite some time. He was first featured on this page in 2021, but he reported on the seed it came from (his unsuccessful KickStarter) earlier in 2020. On the subject of dates, at Computex 2023 Streacom expects the SG10 to go into production by the end of the year.
The main attraction of the Streacom SG10 is its massive passive cooling capabilities. It is said to be able to cool up to 250W CPU and 350W GPU (700W total). It looks pretty well designed.
A major part of its visual appeal comes from the symmetrical dual heatsinks that it wears like a crown. These chunks of aluminum have threaded copper pipes running through them, but they are not heat pipes. Instead, it circulates a liquid coolant that undergoes a cycle of evaporation and condensation within a closed system. In other words, this fanless PC system is mainly kept cool by a pumpless liquid cooling system. One side of the top heatsink is dedicated to CPU cooling and the other side is dedicated to GPU cooling. Both have their own input and output tubes and fittings (dual loop).
Inside the Streacom SG10, we can see that the motherboard and GPU are mounted diagonally at 90 degrees to each other, forming an X-core layout. Mounting the CPU cooling block is pretty much the same as for a typical AiO, but the GPU is a different story. Streacom requires the customer to buy the graphics card and strip the factory cooler to fit the GPU mount and his VRM clamp cooler. Due to the sheer complexity of this, a list of supported graphics cards will be released.
Components of the build we saw on Computex included an Intel Core i9-13900K CPU and an Asus GeForce RTX 4080. Anything that draws as much power as the RTX 4080 is not recommended (around 320 W). A demo Streacom was running showed the entire system cooling over 660 W of heat load.
The Streacom SG10 is said to start production this year and the price for the case and all necessary cooling assemblies is expected to be around $999.
Streacom explained that this hardware monitoring product offers customizable dials that provide status and activity for network, RAM, storage, CPU and GPU. The special reason here is the use of an e-Ink display behind the analog pointer. So the software can be used to create live analog meters for almost any measurable system variable.
The VU1 display is mono and 200 x 144 pixels. Built-in RGB illumination makes it readable under most conditions. A visit to the booth revealed that the lighting appears to come from the bottom edge, illuminating both the dial and the hands.
Strecom wants to keep the possibilities open for VU1 buyers so that they can use VU1 in ways not yet imagined. In addition to the fully customizable display, the needle movement and RGB lighting will also be fully user configurable.
The VU1 unit ships with the VU1 App, which provides the most popular presets we believe buyers will want. So you will soon be able to view things like CPU/GPU temperature and CPU/MEM/NET usage. The plugin will add more features over time.
Initially, Streacom will sell three VU1 units and one hub for $99. No word on exactly when it will be available.