Intel NUC11TNBi5 and Akasa Newton TN Fanless Case Review: Silencing the Tiger
by Ganesh T S on July 22, 2022 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Fanless
- HTPC
- NUC
- Passive Cooling
- UCFF
- Tiger Lake
- Akasa
Akasa Newton TN Noiseless NUC Build
The Akasa Newton TN comes in a nondescript brown box, with the only indicator of the contents being the small barcode sticker with the A-NUC63-M1B moniker on the side. The contents include the main chassis (which doubles up as the heat sink) and an user manual with installation instructions. The standoffs for the i7 Tiger Canyon NUCs come pre-mounted inside the main chassis. The i3 and i5 boards require these to be replaced with slightly different ones that are explicitly marked as being meant for this purpose. The pictures below bring out the miscellaneous components bundled in the package.
Starting from the top left corner in the above picture, we have:
- Akasa AK-TC5026 pro-grade+ thermal paste with a thermal conductivity of 2.9 W/mK.
- Thermal gap fillers to ensure contact between the VRM circuitry and the chassis / heatsink.
- Screws and washers to connect the motherboard and the standoffs
- EMI gaskets for mounting on the HDMI port receptacles
- Thermal gap filler pads and metal block (thermal module) to form the cooling solution for the M.2 2280 SSD
- Serial cable and mounting screws
- 2.5" drive mounting screws, mounting bracket, and transparent protective film for the drive
- SATA adapter board and cable to adapt data + power connector on board to the 2.5" drive's interface
- Screws to mount the 2.5" drive bracket to the chassis
- VESA mounting screws
- Case feet and associated screws
The gallery below includes photographs of the chassis from various angles. We see the front, bottom, and rear panels getting connected to the main chassis using screws that come pre-mounted. The core structure of the heat sink is evident at first look, with ridges / fins running all along the length of the unit. The middle segment is much thicker than the rest, and the long edges have a pleasing curvature (unlike the Turing). This design makes it much easier to handle the case without risking accidental cuts in one's hands and fingers. The ridges run along the sides of the case also. The underside of the case is completely flat and has the panel that can be unscrewed to install the motherboard.
The cut-outs in the front and rear of the main chassis tally with the I/O ports of the standard kit. However, Akasa has included a cut-out for a serial port in the rear panel and two USB 2.0 ports in the front panel.
These functionalities are already present in the NUC11TNBi5 boards, but the standard kit keeps them unused. This is yet another advantage of the Newton over the corresponding Turing (whose I/O is restricted to what is provided by the standard kit). It should also be noted that the Thunderbolt Type-C ports in the Newton TN are slightly recessed, but that presented no issues even with 'bulky' Type-C devices like the Kingston DataTraveler Max (notorious for its width blocking nearby ports when connected to the system). The rear panel also has two antennae mounting holes for optional usage. By default, they are covered with push-in bumpers.
Unless one is starting off with the board version of the NUC, the standard NUC kit first needs to be subject to a teardown before starting the assembly with the Akasa Newton TN. The gallery below pictorially presents the teardown steps for the NUC11TNKi5.
The first step involves the removal of the kit's bottom panel. This reveals the thermal pads attached to the metal underside in order to cool down the M.2 drives, but that is not of concern in this particular task. The installed RAM and SSD are dismounted, with the holding screws retained in the standoffs for future use. Two screws that hold the board in place towards the rear I/O are taken out and kept aside safely. The main part is then turned around and the top panel removed by carefully pushing in the plastic tabs around the perimeter and pulling it up. The plastic frame and the inner metal enclosure are joined by four screws that are exposed after the top panel's removal. Once those screws are out of the picture, the motherboard can be gently prised out. The blower fan and the thermal gap filler across the exit's copper fins can be seen after pulling out the board and turning it around. In order to completely yank out the board, it is necessary to remove the pigtail antennae from the WLAN card. The antennae are attached to the inner metal frame, and can be safely stored for use elsewhere.
The next set of steps in the gallery below pictorially depicts the preparation of the motherboard for installation in the Newton TN chassis.
The blower fan is attached to the flat heat pipes and metal heat spreader by two screws and to the board itself using the fan power connector. The heat spreader itself is mounted using screws with holders at the corner of the Tiger Lake-U (TGL-U) package. Removal of the thermal solution assembly reveals the two dice (CPU and PCH) in the package bathed in thermal paste. The old thermal compound can be completely wiped away with the aid of rubbing alcohol.
The gallery below presents the preparation of the Newton TN chassis for the installation of the board prepared above. Unlike the Turing, only the bottom panel needs to be unscrewed. Inside the case, we see Akasa using three separate boards for servicing the front panel's features. A black wire set originates from the small board with the two USB 2.0 ports. This wire set terminates in two USB 2.0 header connectors. The two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports are enabled by two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A Male-to-Female adapter cables. The female end is permanently affixed to the second board. At the other end of the front panel boards set is the front panel header connector controlling the power switch as well as the power and drive activity LEDs. There is also a round recessed slot for the CMOS battery to slot it.
As mentioned in passing earlier in this section, the pre-mounted standoffs inside the case are meant for the i7 board. A lineman's pliers was used to remove the pre-installed ones, and the supplied Core i3/i5 standoffs were slotted in place. Between the standoffs, a solid raised metal block is in place to connect the TGL-U SiP to the rest of the massive heat sink doubling up as the chassis.
A pictorial representation of the remaining steps in the installation of the board in the Newton TN chassis is provided in the gallery below. Prior to placing the board inside the case, the thermal gap fillers are mounted on the VRM circuitry (inductors and MOSFETs) in a manner similar to how the original heat spreader assembly covered them. The supplied thermal compound is applied liberally over the two dice in the TGL-U package. The area meant for the board installation inside the chassis is cleared of wires, and the board is then placed upside down on the raised metal block - with the thermal compound-bathed package right on top of it, and the rear I/O elements aligned to the rear panel's cut-outs. Four specific screws with the red washers help secure the board to the standoffs installed earlier in the process. Unlike the Turing / Bean Canyon combo, there is no DMIC to worry about in this setup. However, the cables from the front panel boards need to be connected to the motherboard. Keeping the NUC11TN technical reference manual handy is helpful here to determine the locations of the front panel header and the USB 2.0 headers on the board (or, one can just take a look at the last picture in the gallery below). A bit of nifty cable management is necessary here, because the 2.5" drive assembly goes right on top of these cables and wires.
The Turing / Bean Canyon combo reviewed by us did not have any specific thermal solution for the NVMe SSD - but, having chosen a low-power WD SN500 in that build, we got away scot-free. The Newton TN, unfortunately, can't get away easily because the Tiger Canyon board includes support for a PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD (and most of them are notorious heat generators). Akasa has tried to address that aspect with a specific M.2 thermal solution - a metal block and two thermal gap filling pads. The plastic films covering either side of the thermal gap fillers were removed at the appropriate time during the installation process in the gallery below.
After placing the Samsung SSD 980 PRO in the slot, we placed the first thermal gap filling pad on top of the label, and the other pad across the metal block. The metal block was then positioned on top of the SSD + gap filler combination. The final plastic film on top was removed just prior to screwing in the bottom panel. The serial port adjacent to the SSD slot is connected to the serial cable, which is then mounted using screws slotting in from the outside to hold the serial port in place.
Our build does not utilize any 2.5" drive, but we still did a dry run of installing one just to get an idea of the steps involved in the process. The steps are brought out in the gallery below. The connector board is readied by attaching the flexible SATA connector cable carrying both power and data to it. In parallel, the 2.5" drive is attached to the mounting bracket with the protective film in place to prevent direct contact between the drive and the bracket at the connecting points. The SATA connector board is attached to the SSD, while the flexible connector cable's other end slots into the SATA port behind the M.2 2242 slot. The bracket is them attached to the main chassis, running right on top of the USB Type-A cables, as shown in the gallery below.
The final set of steps in the assembly process relate to the re-attachment of the bottom panel. Users expecting to VESA mount the system can use the same screws that held the panel in place originally. For flat placement, Akasa supplies case feet with appropriate screws that slot into the same holes. We opted for the latter configuration, as shown in the gallery above.
Overall, the build process was quite smooth - in fact, much easier compared to the Akasa Turing because of the space available inside the case. Folks used to building PCs from scratch will find it quite easy, while less experience folks can easily get by with the installation manual and detailed write-ups similar to the one above. The supplied manual assumes that users are starting off with the NUC11TNBxx boards, and does not include disassembly instructions for the original kit. We have addressed that in the above description.
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meacupla - Sunday, July 24, 2022 - link
At that point, you may just want to use a white noise makerabufrejoval - Sunday, July 24, 2022 - link
Thanks, that's what I've been hearing, too!And in a way that's what I've been thinking without hinting it explicitely to Ryan1981: Getting yourself tuned to zero noise is both very expensive and counter-productive.
Humanity has operated on communal and external noises for hundreds of thousands of years: a large part of our brain is designed to do nothing but discriminate between sounds that indicate danger and those that don't. A total absense of sound only has your brain increase the sensitivity of your receptors to the point where minute sounds become a bother.
Instead of making electronics completely silient, we should have them emit a soft snore or other comforting noises akin to humans being human.
There is an auditorium in the midst of Gibraltar's rock, that offers a level of silence no recording studio can match. Anyone left alone in there is bound to develop tinnitus as the brain keeps increasing the sensitivity in your in-ear "DSPs" to the point where they get the "social noise" evolution set as a base line.
abufrejoval - Saturday, July 23, 2022 - link
Your previous Akasa tests had me hoping, that I’d be able to silence any NUC, if a passive Mini-ITX based solution, like the one I’d been using for Gemini Lake Atoms, wasn’t going to be available.I had sampled a NUC or Brix once before and was quite shocked at the nervous noise it generated: the fan gave you an audio variant of a CPU graph that you couldn’t just click away. And at top load, it was an unacceptable howler.
I wanted something with a bit more punch than an Atom, but a similar idle power and obviously a notebook SoC should be able to do that. But the only way to get that stationary and at a reasonable price (with a full complement of RAM) was to get a NUC.
When I hit across a NUC8i7BEK with the “double sized” Iris 655 48EU iGPU for only €300, my resistance to the form factor melted away and I gave it a try, even if the primary use case—a Linux based HCI server—had zero use for a GPU. After all you never know if it might be recycled as a desktop later and I was just curious to see how this “Apple spec” SoC would perform.
It turned out that they key to making it unnoticeable was to ensure that the fan would never rev beyond 3200rpm and for that I had to ensure that PL2 would never last longer than 10 seconds nor exceed 50 Watts, while a PL1 of 15 Watts ensured low fan revs even for a power virus.
I had just ordered another, when I saw a hexa-core i7-10700U based NUC (with a very ordinary 24EU iGPU) going for just €50 extra. So I cancelled and got that one instead. It turned out much more difficult to tame, because Intel was desperate to wring performance leadership out of 14nm in a tiny NUC and only Watts can get you there. I managed again, playing with the PL1/PL2/TAU to get a system rather good for those sprints where the Atoms were trying my patience, yet with a low-enough power and noise footprint to operate 24x7 as a server.
Half a year later in February 2021 I landed a fresh Tiger Lake NUC11PAHi7, that’s played hard to get ever since. But mine is a Panther Canyon variant, evidently consumer optimized, with a completely different layout of ports for which Akasa doesn’t build a chassis. I don’t know if Intel already made these differentiations in earlier generations, but it’s rather annoying when only the number of models increases, not their availability.
Again, that Tiger could also be tamed to unnoticeability via the excellent control Intel’s NUCs offer in the BIOS. Of course, even better would be a set of CLI tools which allow you to adjust these things from Linux…
In terms of snappiness, none of them needs to hide, because at least for a couple of seconds they will all clock to 4.5 GHz or more and match any desktop. For brutal workloads I have other machines with 16 or 18 cores and 140-150 Watts of TDP made tolerable via lots of giant Noctua fans and coolers.
While there is no noticeable difference in scalar performance between the NUC8 and NUC10, the two extra cores on the NUC10 i7-10700U will obviously deliver a bit of extra punch until TAU runs out. But the Tiger Lake annihilates their value with better IPC: with its four cores it matches pretty exactly the six cores of its predecessor on any parallelized workload while the single core performance is on par with a Zen 3 at the same clocks.
The “double sized” Iris 655 with its 128MB of eDRAM on the NUC8 turned out to be a paper tiger, effectively adding only 50% of extra power vs. a normal 24EU UHD iGPU at the expense of quite a bit of silicon real-estate and production complexity. If Intel were to sell “Apple spec” chips only, I doubt they’d be nearly as profitable. The list price of an i7-8565U is $409 while the list price of an i7-8559U is only $22 higher. They are close to identical on the CPU side, but the GT3e extra die area and the 128MB eDRAM chip must have cost a pretty penny! I still own a notebook with an i5-6267U, a dual-core Skylake variant of GT3e where the CPU cores were probably the smallest piece of the chip’s silicon pie.
Really astounding was how badly it got beaten by the 96 Tiger Lake Xe iGPU, which doesn’t have eDRAM for extra bandwidth: that one scaled rather nicely to 4x 24EU performance, beating my Ryzen 3 based 5800U APUs in most benchmarks, just as you describe.
I don’t really know where that performance is coming from, because DRAM bandwidth is very similar across the board and only around 40GB/s. All my NUCs run with 64GB and while the timings may have gone from DDR4-2400 (NUC8) to DDR4-3200 (NUC11), that’s just adding wait states on these low power devise.
I love running Google Maps in 3D globe view on Chrome derived browsers at 4k, because it really shows what this low power hardware is capable of with perhaps the most efficient 3D pipeline on the planet: it puts Microsoft’s best flight simulator to shame on an RTX 2080ti!
It proves the main issue is software, not hardware. But existing real-world games are no fun on these boxes, even the Tiger Lake needs another power of 10 to become reasonably attractive at 4k.
Another aftermarket NUC solution would evidently be one that adds a beefy active cooling, say a Noctua NH-L9i or even a Noctua NH-L9x65. Obviously these chips could sustain 65 Watts with proper cooling and then deliver quite a reasonable desktop performance in only a slightly bigger form factor.
BTW: for my use as µ-servers I've added TB3 based 10Gbase-T NICs so the NVMe based SSDs contributing bricks to the Gluster file system don't get slowed down to inacceptable levels.
I'd have preferred to make do with TB3 based networking via direct connect cables, but fell afoul the fact that Thunderbolt ports don't have MACs and will randomly generate them on every boot or plug event. It's the software.... again!
xane - Sunday, July 24, 2022 - link
Interesting to see continued development, but for me nothing beats Cirrus7 cases from Germany. I do understand it's subjective, though.Hixbot - Tuesday, July 26, 2022 - link
Ganesh, I've been politely asking you add noise testing to your mini-pc tests for the last couple years. Noise is a very important characteristic to home theater PCs.Here we are with a fanless offering with some obvious thermal compromises, but your other reviews don't highlight noise at load and therefore cannot be compared.
ganeshts - Tuesday, July 26, 2022 - link
If there is any noise / electrical coil whine, or anything of that sort, I do make a mention of it in the concluding section (like I did in the Zotac ZBOX CI660 nano).Other than that, the ambient noise / noise floor is too high in the environment where these systems are tested for a sound meter to pick up anything at all from them.
kepstin - Wednesday, August 24, 2022 - link
You should really consider retiring/updating that Gimp application startup benchmark… The multithreaded scaling being weird is actually a bug where it's doing extra redundant work that it shouldn't have been, and has been fixed (or at least worked around) in newer versions.storapa - Thursday, September 1, 2022 - link
Had an old NUC3 with the old version of the Akasa Newton. Worked like a charm for years, until the board died (google results suggests it was a common problem with NUC3, not the case).But note that the kensington "lock" doesn't add any security, as you can remove the entire backplate with 4 screws..