Streacom released a GPU cooling kit for its fanless Mini-ITX chassis, the DB4. The kit allows for fanless cooling of a discrete GPU, fulfilling the promise of a totally silent build.
Streacom revealed the passively cooled DB4 chassis in mid-2016. The chassis relies on its all-aluminum construction and thick, milled aluminum side panels to absorb and dissipate heat. The cooling principle behind it is to use precisely spaced heatpipe bridges to contact hot parts to the walls of the chassis. The fixed vertical distance between the components and the walls, plus clever design, allows universal, fixed-length heatpipe bridges to be used for most hardware configurations. When the chassis launched, it came packaged only with a CPU cooling bridge, so there was no capacity to passively cool a discrete GPU.
That has finally changed with the release of the DB4 GPU cooling kit. Working on the same principle as the CPU cooling bridge, the GPU bridge connects to another side panel of the chassis. It uses even more heatpipes and attaches to the GPU in a manner similar to a waterblock. The cooling bridge for the GPU core seems substantial, but the cooling capacity is only 75W. This is enough for a Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti or an AMD RX 560. Although these cards typically don’t have coolers that directly contact their VRM or memory, they are still actively cooled. We’ve seen issues with VRM overheating in the past, so we hope that the stick-on heatsinks included with DB4 GPU kit are enough.
We do not currently have pricing or availability for the DB4 GPU cooling kit.
