Fanless Notebooks

I like silent notebooks, so I'm trying to find out what's in the market today of fanless notebooks, so far, I've found:

Dell Mini 10 / 10V
Nokia Booklet 3G
ASUS PC T91
Sony Vaio P
Panasonic Toughbook CF-F8 / CF-30
Nec VersaPro VS-7

Do you have anymore to add?

Thanks, I will try to keep the list updated.

 

Coming in Dec/Jan all Pinetrail netbooks should be fanless.

Also the Acer Aspire 751 is fanless.

 

I had no idea fanless laptop existed. Interesting.

 

Other Dell Inspiron Mini series, Mini 9 and 12, are also fanless.

 

Yeah, but Mini 9 and 12 are not available anymore.

The Acer 751 is not fanless, just very quiet.

 

what about macbooks?

 

Yeah, isn't the Air fanless? There's also a Panasonic Toughbook, you know, the one with absolutely no openings and can be submerged underwater. Entirely metal frame. I think it's a few grand though.

What about really quiet laptops? The Asus Ul30 and Thinkpad X200 are both virtually silent. The Macbooks are pretty silent too.

 

Ooppss, sorry about that... Few eBay sellers still have them new though...

 

You can turn most fans off in laptops completely. All you have to do is to manipulate the ACPI controller. E.g. I can turn the fan completely off thus not producing any noticible noise.

 

LOL.

A fanless notebook isn't the same thing as a notebook where you can turn off the fan.

Good point never the less.

 

Macs are not fanless, yeah, the Panasonic Toughbook seems to be fanless, I will check it and add it to the list, thanks guys.

 

Not positive, but the Dell Latitude E6400 XFR may be fanless.

 

NB200 is not fanless, just very quiet, same goes for the Dell E6400.

I added the little NEC netbook, which is fanless.

 

The only new Panasonic models that are fan-less are the fully rugged cf-30 and cf-19 tablet
I had a business class F8 and it has a fan


Alex

 

According to this, the F8 is fanless:

http://www.toughbook.co.nz/main/mobile-computing_cfF8.asp

 

You can always take the fan out of the netbook and low powered laptops and still run it perfectly.

 

The harddisk drive makes more noise than the CPU/graphics fan. So getting a fanless laptop, using a regular HDD defeats the whole purpose. You can't tell the difference unless you're upgrading the HDD to SSD and there can't be any video performance out of that laptop, video needs a way to cool. Consider a CPU/GPU temp monitor of some sort if you plan to take out all fans even if this is not recommended.

 

for toughbooks, CF-18, CF-19, CF-29, and CF30 are fanless. Used 18's and 29's arent too badly priced, and ARE silent with drives OR ssd's

 

disable fan in bios so will not run all tim

 

I don't know, I think alot of consumers don't realize what they are sacraficing when they put thin, light and quiet high on their list of priorities. If you value high, reliable performance then thermal management should be near the top of the list along with the best performing components.

 

well, i agree with you sgilmore62. but for me, having live gigs in clubs and such, a closed, fanless laptop would actually gain me reliability. no dirt from the dirty air getting stuck in there (with smoke generators and such, and a lot of smoking and stuff going on in there), and one of my laptops got killed by spilling a drink into it's fan-slots..

they're more like cellphones if they dont' have fans: more rugged for outside use.

 

Is that why im seeing more CF-30 laptops in the clubs now?

 

might be power depends on the software. it has to be "good enough". for djing software (like traktor), that's nowadays even a netbook so you can now invest in more rugged solutions. for ableton live, you can right now not get enough performance for everything into a laptop (an i7 would be awesome ) but there, again, you can draw the line by testing how much resources "your setup" needs.

and yes, rugged things that survive anything are important in clubs. everything can happen. everything can drop, get a drink spilled over, get a power shock due do some bad wiring, etc. and it should survive all that.

 

and that's btw why a lot of live-performing people switched to ssds. for the stability in case of vibrations (loud music). but they never go back because of the performance

 

Agreed, ... okay I have to admit I have installed a few Cf-30's in clubs with big drives and rubber external keyboards .... that setup will last years as where your pretty little desk ornament may last a night or 2.

but for some reason people never seem to listen to logic, and only the LOOKS and the Specs

Never used Traktor or heard of ableton live, I seem to get more call for varius versions of PCDJ. But im no audiophile either just a hardware guy.

 

well, traktor is one of the major dj software of nowadays. ableton live is an all-things-possible music software that can go from djing to live performances to bands with concerts and handle sort of all tasks (depeche mode uses one pc just to re-edit live all the drummer components, so they sound more electronic).

funny, never heard of pcdj

yeah, my pretty desk ornaments so far survived well, and that's why i've chosen them. pretty AND robust (semi-rugged, as hp calls them.. elitebook).

and yeah, i guess the cf-30 survive the clubs actually

 

im guessing YOU take care of your equipment, most of the idiot in house Dj's dont care if they dump a rum and coke all over a laptop.

looked at traktor and ableton, looks pretty impressive
the ones I deal with like PCDJ for the great karaoke support, the mixers and beat matcher, as well as simple support for most of denon's equipment.

as for desk ornament I wasnt referring to your stuff, you got nice equipment but lotta guys are getting the show pieces with NO durability or power ALL looks

 

sure. but mine is desktop ornament, too.. but good one

and well, i get used to not take care about my equipment anymore. because no matter how much i do, someone else will sure it up one day. i prefer to take care about the stuff i ... care about: having a backup solution so i lose no data. having a live backup solution so when anything s up, i can still continue making music somehow, etc..

so i take care about not having to rely much on my stuff. having taken that, i have then a great life, relaxed, having much fun with my stuff. if anything fails => replace.

my laptop is the most used and most abused system in my region

 

Backups are sure the way to go. Backup files, backup data, backup laptops

and its nice to meet a fellow equipment abuser, I never could fugure out why you would baby equipment when you can use it.

 

What?? People at clubs aren't taking care of equipment?? The humanity!!

People can barely take care of their bodies at a club...

 

haven't seen anyone losing it's body at a club so far..

 

I think there is few Fujitsu super small machines that are also fanless.

 

you can also consider a very low noise notebook... they can be as silent as fanless ones.

 

High powered one can too, to some extent. I forgot to plug the fan back when I was cleaning my gx620 and the only time it shut down was when I tried launching a game.

 

LOL.

I wouldn't consider that qualifying as a fanless laptop.

:laugh:

 

That information is incorrect

Or at least not applicable for the north american cf-f8 that I had for 6 months

This picture shows the fan grill
And here is a quote from the owners manual
Download here

I installed a samsung 64 GB slc sdd in the F8 and it was quite ,but not silent
My cf-19 and cf-30 with a ssd drives are silent

Alex

 

heh, the moment i had a fanless desktop with an ssd in (atom based) i had to realize that my 24" screen HAS A FAN IN IT.

the moment the pc is silent, you start to note so much other things that aren't

 

The new LG X300 is fanless, looks good:

http://www.lge.com/global/press-rel...s-latest-mobile-pc-marvel-hits-the-market.jsp

 

Funny that a google search brought me to this thread (since I'm an active member here ). Besides the LG that wii mentioned, are there any netbooks/notebooks currently available that are fanless?

 

I think most of the netbooks noted in the first post are still pretty current/relevant. I know a friend who bought the latest Dell Mini 10 and it is still fanless. Fanless mainstream machines are still pretty much nonexistent.

 

Thanks Commander Wolf. I hope they become more and more common at some point. LED backlit systems with no moving parts should last a long time, is my thinking.

Edit: The Dell Mini 10 you mentioned, that's with the latest pineview platform is it not?

 

Yeah, the 1012 comes standard with an N450.

 

Well. I mean the system WILL use power, right. Like, say, a very low 20W. If you don't get rid of that using a fan (convection of air) it'll be dissipated through conduction. Your notebook will feel like a 20W lightbulb. And if you are wondering what a 20W lightbulb feels like... touch one sometime and you'll know.

 

A typical Dell Mini 10 should use between 4W to 12W, hardly 20W. Most mainstream notebooks shouldn't be using 20W on idle, in any case.

But relating to the OP, the only fanless notebooks outside of the Mini 10 netbook are some of the heavy-duty ToughBook equivalents that are fully water-sealed (and even then, some do have special fans).

 

Oh, 20W they do use for sure. Six cell batteries are usually 63WHr, and many mainstream notebooks can last about 3 hours on battery, hence 20W. Also, we can't just say that we're going to build a fanless notebook that uses 10W idle and 40W under load, but the design can only cope with 15W. But yeah, I hope the Dell Mini doesn't use that much. Still, it's a lot of energy to dissipate in a thin case without a fan.

 

My 16" notebook (specs in sig) on idle uses 12-13W, any netbook would easily use half that.

 

I was interested in building a fanless notebook, or more so modifying one to the point where a fan would not be necessary.

There are a couple Latitudes I was looking at;

E6400
E4200
Latitude 13

Course I figure it has to have a SUxxxx Intel processor, manipulation of RMClock, and an SSD drive.

Anyone have any other particular experience and/or recommendation on achieving it. I am not looking for a netbook, more like 12-13 inch, very slim notebook.

 

All I can say is that when I had my Acer 3810T with an SU9400 undervolted to .8750 with RMClock and Intel Gen 2 ssd, man that thing stayed cool and quiet. Was nice.

 

As a random-ish digression, the Fujitsu FMW-BIBLO NW water-cooled notebook is sort of fan-less, I think... only available in Japan, though. As I recall, they designed it with water cooling because some people in Japan are "very sensitive to noise" or some such.

 

How does a fanless notebook cool the processor and other parts?