I was using a large Lenovo Y70-70 laptop as a pseudo-desktop machine and
additional monitor. It's quite powerful, but its fans would run at all
times. Getting really tired of that, I googled for the better part of an
afternoon for "fanless desktop" and it turns out it's much harder to
find one than I'd initially thought. (Slow fanless machines are easy to
find, but I was looking for one as powerful as any desktop.)
At about the time I was ready to give up I found an obscure site of an
Israeli company that claimed to make a real i7 fanless machine. It was
releases very recently, too, so I'm thinking it might be of interest to
some others.
So I got it from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CP4S15E. I fitted
it with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. It's more expensive than a traditional
desktop of the same configuration, but as soon as you turn it on, you
know where that extra money went. (Speaking of money, ironically, the
extra expenditure has had an unexpected return: I occasionally daytrade,
and when I do I need CNBC on. That made the laptop's fans make even more
noise than usual, so I was avoiding it. Nowadays I can keep CNBC on no
problem, which allowed me to handily cover the extra expense.)
I've put Linux Mint on it (which is what they recommend) and it works
swimmingly. The handling of multiple desktops is just awesome. The one
thing I don't like about the machine is it always powers the discrete
graphics card, which I don't use. Their engineers (who've been very
active to respond to my emailed questions) said a future BIOS upgrade
will allow powering off the card.
Thought this might help others looking for a fanless dekstop.
Andrei
