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

Intel’s Tiger Lake-based NUC has been shipping for over a year. Initially four product lines were planned. Panther Canyon for the mainstream market, Tiger Canyon for the professional / business market, Phantom Canyon for game enthusiasts, and Elkbay computing elements for embedded applications. Supply chain challenges have impacted the availability of different models in different regions, but nonetheless do not prevent Intel partners from offering complementary products.

Akasa Is a well-known manufacturer of thermal solutions for industrial applications and computing systems for home consumers. Since 2013, we have maintained the lineup of passive cooling cases for Intel’s NUC. I saw a Turing case for the Bean Canyon NUC a few years ago and it was a pleasant surprise. In fanless cases, it’s rarely possible to cool a processor better than an actively cooled solution for the same workload, and that’s exactly what Akasa Turing has achieved. For Intel Tiger Canyon NUC Akasa carries Three major products-Newton, TN, Plato, TN, Turing, TN. The company used Intel’s NUC11TNKi5 sample to sample Newton TN for review.

In terms of Tiger Lake UCFF, we only reviewed two systems, last year’s ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 and more recently the Supermicro SYS-E100-12T-H. We also took the opportunity of the Akasa Newton TN review to give a detailed evaluation of Intel’s own product, the NUC11TNKi5 TigerCanyon NUC. The following review introduces Tiger Canyon NUC hardware and details the process of building a fanless version with Akasa Newton TN before going into regular platform analysis. This is followed by a benchmark number of passive cooling configurations compared to the original NUC11TNKi5 (along with many other systems). Finally, the results of the thermal evaluation of the fanless system are shown. The combination gives us ideas on what Tiger Lake can offer in a reasonably compact fanless system and whether Newton TN can replicate Turing’s success.

Introduction and impression of the product

Intel’s Tiger Lake processor introduced the Willow Cove microarchitecture to the market last year, manufactured on a reasonably mature 10nm process. The focus was primarily on the mobile market, but last year the company launched a series of mini PCs based on them. The company categorizes Tiger Lake-based mini PCs into various categories such as performance, professional, enthusiast, and extreme. The NUC11 Pro Kit NUC11TNKi5 (Tiger Canyon) under consideration today is a UCFF solution that places a 100mmx100mm motherboard in a 117mmx112mmx37mm chassis. The board comes with a soldered processor (Core i5-1135G7). It belongs to the Tiger Lake-U family and can operate in a configurable TDP range from 12W to 28W. The NUC’s default BIOS settings set the PL1 (persistent) and PL2 (burst mode) levels to 28W and 64W, respectively, and the PL1 time window to 28 seconds.

End users have the flexibility to choose their own storage device and RAM. For best performance, you can use PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD and support DDR4-3200 SODIMM. The following components are pre-installed in the NUC11TNKi5 sample.

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

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

The specifications for the Intel NUC11TNKi5 review configuration are summarized in the table below.

The NUC package includes regular VESA mounts and screws, as well as an integration guide. A region-specific power cord is included with the 120W (19V @ 6.32A) adapter.

The gallery below provides an overview of the kit chassis and I / O distribution. The main difference when compared to the Tiger Lake NUC (Panther Canyon) performance line is the lack of an SDXC card reader, HDMI 2.0b port instead of Mini DP port, and an additional USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port. Limited to the front panel and the rear panel of the Thunderbolt Type-C port only.

Compared to the performance line, the NUC11 Pro line adds official support for Linux and Window IoT, supports operation over a wider DC input voltage range, and has an additional internal SSD slot (M.2 2242 SATA / PCIe 3.0). It has x1) and has vPro function. Choose SKUs to extend the product life cycle.

The standard NUC11TNKi5 kit above works for most scenarios, but there may be use cases that require no moving parts at all. In industrial deployments, the reason may be that it may be necessary to avoid performance degradation due to reduced cooling efficiency due to dust buildup. For professional creators, it may be because they need to avoid external noise that affects the output of their work. The average household consumer may also prefer a silent system to focus more on the work at hand. With HTPCs, multimedia content can be enjoyed without distraction. This is the most important aspect for audiophiles.

Traditionally, passively cooled computing systems have been severely underpowered for general purpose use or have significant premiums in terms of both cost and physical footprint. However, the combination of improved computational performance per watt and the design of a new passive cooling chassis (no arm and leg costs for mass production) allows consumers to create powerful yet affordable fanless systems. It came to be. That’s where vendors like Akasa come in. For the NUC11TNBi5 (the board in the NUC11TNKi5 kit), Akasa has three different cases and the dimensions can meet virtually any deployment scenario.

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

First, run the standard kit through the benchmarking process. After that, the unit was disassembled and the board was moved to Akasa Newton TN. The same benchmark was processed again in the Newton build.

Before analyzing the NUC11 platform and reviewing the comparative specifications of the system under consideration, let’s take a closer look at the build process with Akasa Newton TN.