Quiet PC Nofan A830a review: Silence can’t save this overpriced PC
Designed to appeal to those for whom any noise is too much noise, the A830a is entirely passively cooled
Pros
- Virtually no fan noise
Cons
- Overly expensive
- Very slow
If you’re going to break the budget, you’re going to need a reason. In the case of the Quiet PC Nofan, that reason the promise of wholly passive cooling.
Quiet PC Nofan A830a review: Features
The Nofan A830a hasn’t a single moving part in operation. The processor is cooled using the Nofan heatsink from which the system takes its name; the power supply, meanwhile, has its own passive heatsink inside. Coupled with solid-state storage, it’s a system that makes absolutely no noise whether it’s switched on or switched off.
Sadly, silence doesn’t come cheap. At £659, the Nofan is a particularly expensive system – and that expense has gone wholly into the passive cooling system. The components under those heatsinks sit very much at the entry-level end of the spectrum: the AMD Athlon 200GE is a dual-core, four-thread chip running at 3.2GHz, the 8GB of DDR-2400 memory is nothing special, and while the SSD is the faster M.2 PCIe type it stores just 128GB – and there’s no bundled mechanical drive to offer additional storage.
Quiet PC Nofan A830a review: Performance
Those specifications show in many of the benchmark results: the Quiet PC Nofan returned meagre results in the benchmarking tests and Speedometer 2.0 browser test, and came up woefully short in the PC Mark 10 tests, too. Thanks to the superior graphics chip built into the Athlon APU, its graphical performance in the Unigine Superposition benchmark proved better at least than its Intel counterparts – although given that these counterparts are found in much cheaper machines, this should come as no surprise.
If money is no object, the Nofan can be configured with considerably better hardware – although there’s a limit to what the passive heatsink can handle on the CPU front – making it a considerably more competitive option for those needing silence and performance combined, and for whom a doubling of the budget wouldn’t be an issue.
Quiet PC Nofan A830a review: Verdict
At this end of the market, though, the Nofan is simply too slow and too expensive. Only consider it if you absolutely need complete silence while you work… in which case a cheaper system would leave room in the budget for noise-cancelling headphones, while offering much better performance.