In Taiwan, Motherboard manufacturing company MSI is working on an interesting technology with new powerless cooling fans in their labs, which harvest the heat from processor with a small Stirling Engine. It all falls under the ECO friendly project, which we hope to see in near future. Since power saving green gadgets is hotly discussed topic, MSI has employed the Stirling Engine Theory to power a cooling fan without the need of electricity.
Heat is transferred from the motherboard northbridge chipset and according to the Stirling Engine Theory it is able to spin the cooling fan and that cools down the heatsink. MSI said that they would put world’s first powerless air cooler to an Nvidia motherboard.
Here is a demonstration video explaining how it actually works.
This kit by VIA allows us to construct a x86 PC based on the Pico-ITX motherboard standard. The computer can be so small that it could fit inside of a drive bay on desktop PC. It may not be the most powerful machine, but it can take care of most basic tasks. Here’s a complete rundown of the specification:
CPU - 1GHz VIA C7 Processor
Chipset - VIA VX700 Unified Digital Media IGP Chipset
Memory Support - 1 DDR2 533 SODIMM Socket, Up to 1GB
Hard Disk Support - 1 UltraDMA 133/100/66 IDE 2.5″ Hard Disk
Operation System Support - Windows 2000 / XP, WinCE, XPe, Linux
USB Ports - 4 USB 2.0 ports
LAN Port - 1 10/100Mbps RJ-45 LAN port
Audio - Build-in High Definition Audio
Audio Ports - 1 Microphone-in jack & 1 Line-out jack
Display Port - 1 VGA port
Dimensions - 15cm x 11cm x 4.5cm
Average System Weight - 520g
This will come out in market by the Dec 14, for around $300.
