PC accessory maker Akasa has been offering fanless NUC cases for years. Take the guts of an Intel NUC mini-computer, remove them from the original case and put them into an Akasa chassis and you have a small, silent, passively-cooled PC.
Now Akasa is introducing its first actively-cooled NUC case. It’s compatible with Intel’s new NUC 9 Pro and NUC 9 Extreme Compute Elements. In other words, the new Akasa Venom QX chassis is the company’s version of Intel’s modular Ghost Canyon and Quartz Canyon NUC systems.
Rather than a standard motherboard, the case has a backplane with three PCIe slots, allowing you to connect Intel’s PC-on-a-module to use one or both of the other slots for a discrete graphics card.
Akasa says its system has an 800W SFX power supply and supports up to a 300mm graphics card (Intel’s Ghost Canyon NUC only has room for cards up to 203mm).
The aluminum chassis measures 14.8″ x 10.2″ x 7.1″ and features top and side vents and room for 3 8cm fans to keep the system cool.
There’s a plastic panel on the front with a power button and LED light plus two USB-A ports. And the system also has a 2.5 inch drive bay for a hard drive or SSD.
While the Venom QX is Akasa’s first NUC 9 chassis, the company also plans to release two more later in the first quarter of 2020: the upcoming Akasa Turing QX and Galileo QX are both passively cooled cases designed for Intel’s NUC Compute Element systems.
Akasa joins several other companies in offering third-party cases for the Intel NUC Compute Element. Razer, Cooler Master and ADATA XPG all have their own solutions.
via @fanlesstech, @Akasa_tw and TechForTechs