Nofan IcePipe A43-H67 Silent PC review

Many PCs have arrived in the PC Pro Labs claiming to be silent, but despite seeing clever cooling and case modifications, we usually find a pesky fan or two somewhere to spoil the ambience. Not so with this one. Remember the name Nofan: set up by the founder of Zalman, its IcePipe A43-H67 Silent PC does things differently.

For starters, despite a full-fat Core i5-2500K processor it’s completely passively cooled, and the interior is dominated by the most ridiculous heatsink we’ve ever seen. The Nofan CR-100A cooler measures a massive 220mm across, and more closely resembles a hamster wheel than a piece of cooling equipment. Its donut shape houses scores of metal fins designed to dissipate heat from the Sandy Bridge processor.

The chassis has no case fans of its own, instead relying on a meshed front panel to allow air to drift inside. The 400W Nofan power supply is fanless too, instead being built around an aluminium heatsink. There’s understandably no graphics card – silence and gaming don’t tend to mix – with the integrated chip inside the processor taking charge of displays, and there’s no sign of a crunching hard disk, either. Instead, Nofan has installed Windows 7 Home Premium on a 120GB OCZ Vortex 2E SSD, which makes up in silence what it loses in capacity.

The result is startling. We’re used to hearing so-called quiet systems emit at least a low hum, so to put an ear to the side of the Nofan and hear absolutely nothing was something of a strange experience. It’s so quiet you’ll need to rely on the lights on the front to tell when it’s on; even with the side panel removed we could discern only the tiniest hint of the electric whine of the PSU’s capacitors.

That cooler does more than only eliminate noise. The Core i5-2500K idled at 36°C, and under full load from our benchmarks rose to a comfortable 75°C. That’s nowhere near its thermal limit, and lower than we see from many actively cooled processors. Power consumption was also excellent, with an idle power draw for the entire PC of only 33W. Under load, that rose to a mere 124W.

Such a unique build inevitably creates restrictions elsewhere, with the huge heatsink the main culprit. It’s big enough to block several upgrade paths, with the two spare DIMM sockets and some of the motherboard’s PCI Express x16 and x1 slots inaccessible. There isn’t much room elsewhere in the diminutive chassis, either, with only two tool-free hard disk bays at the bottom of the case. You’re very much buying Nofan’s pre-assembled expertise, rather than a PC you’ll add to regularly over time.

The specification is understandably limited as well. The 3.3GHz Core i5-2500K is a powerful processor at stock speeds – it managed a perfectly respectable 0.94 in our Real World Benchmarks – but you won’t be able to apply the same dramatic overclocks we see on today’s noisier PCs. We’d imagine the current high of 4.8GHz is out of range at least.

You also have to make do with integrated graphics, although combined with a fast processor this isn’t a big problem these days. Our tests proved the Nofan is adept when it comes to media, handling 1080p test clips perfectly smoothly, but 40fps in our lowest Crysis test should tell you what kind of serious games you’ll be playing: not many.

Those working with HD movies might find the 120GB SSD restrictive, and the inclusion of 4GB of RAM feels a little stingy these days, but this isn’t meant as a high-powered cutting-edge PC. You get a Blu-ray drive, so you could easily have the Nofan hidden away in a living room making barely a peep, or happily running away in a bedroom while you sleep.

You’ll pay a fair bit for the privilege, with the price set at £1,123 inc VAT – and that’s for the base unit alone. That cash could obviously go further elsewhere, with the Palicomp Phoenix i5 Z68 Warrior proving more powerful and including a monitor for almost the same money.

But the Nofan is an entirely different proposition. Aside from the little Tranquil iXLS, it’s one of the only entirely passive machines we’ve seen, and its silence really is something spectacular. Yes, it’s rather niche, but if a silent PC is what you’re after you won’t find anything quite like it.

Nofan products are available in the UK through Quiet PC.

Related Posts

How To Make Your Phone Vibrate on Silent Samsung Galaxy S7 Review: A Great Phone in its Day, but Don’t Buy One Private Internet Access Review “Your Payment Requires Additional Review” in Zelle – What Does it Mean? CyberGhost Review Pluto TV Review—Is It Worth It? ExpressVPN Review – Unbiased and Tested In-House How to Record Discord Audio in OBS How to Clear or Edit the Continue Watching List in Netflix on Any Device