This Zotac Tiny PC Takes a New Approach to Cooling

There are a few ways to cool down an electronic device: fans, passive cooling (which uses just heatsinks and natural air convection), and water cooling to name a few. This Zotac tiny PC, however, proposes a fourth, interesting way.

The Zotac ZBOX PI430AJ Pico has been announced ahead of Computex 2023, and its specs are really nothing special. We have an Intel Core i3-N300 CPU, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, DisplayPort 1.4, and all that good stuff. But it has two special things going for it. First off, it’s tiny, even compared with some of the other tiny PCs we’ve covered. And second, it’s that small because of the cooling tech it uses, which is made by a company called Frore Systems.

The PC uses two AirJets, which are pretty much tiny, flat cooling solid state modules with “vibrating membranes” inside that create a powerful suction force — 1,750 pascals of backpressure, to be more precise. The force sucks heat from the PC pretty effectively and literally ejects it from the back of the system through tiny openings. This probably isn’t more effective than cooling solutions that require more space, such as water cooling, but it’s a decent alternative for thin, small devices that are otherwise cooled using tiny fans or just passively cooled.

Testing shows that AirJets are effective at pulling heat out of the Zotac PC, with an AirJet-equipped system running more smoothly in constant stress tests compared to the same PC with a classic cooling design.

If you want to check out the PC and its cooling system in action, you’ll have to wait until it launches. Zotac is aiming to put this on store shelves by the end of 2023 for $499, but we don’t have an exact date.

Source: Zotac, ExtremeTech, The Verge