Low Carbon PC WIND Mini Computer Review

I have news for you, the days of large computers taking up your desk, floor, or entertainment center are long gone.  A lot of case manufacturers have made good money making small form factor PC enclosures and the seeming limited motherboard supply is catching up.  Some PC manufacturers have already started to take advantage of the newer technology and have released products that not only perform on par with today’s standard desktops, they look great and they take up very little space too.  Low Carbon PC aims to take this one step further by putting together eco-friendly systems that use little power but deliver big on performance, while looking rather stylish at the same time.  If Low Carbon PC is able to deliver on all of these, then your trips to the computer store to buy individual components may be coming to an end.

Some of us have heard of or have seen some of the TINY computers put out by companies like ViewSonic, Acer, Asus, Zotac and the like; but few of us have every really taken it as far as buying one.  The reason is usually  the lack of upgrade ability for these types of machines.  Low Carbon PC (LCPC from now on) goes a bit further and designed a system that is small in form but is built from normal computer parts; parts you can get from retail computer parts stores.

If you start to examine what makes the LCPC, you will first notice the all aluminum and completely recyclable chassis that homes the components.  The chassis is not made of some super thin aluminum either; this is a solid 4mm thick hunk of aluminum pancaked on top and bottom by completely aluminum panels with laser cut ventilation holes.  The chassis measures only 3.2″ x 8.6″ x 8.4″ making it smaller than an XBOX 360 but a bit larger than a Wii.  That means that this computer can fit nicely in your home entertainment center and look fantastic, or sit on your desk and barely be noticed.

As the chassis is entirely made of aluminum, it contributes to the overall cooling of the system.  However, given that the chassis is extremely small, the cooling is handled by the ventilation holes and a small 60 mm fan (that pushes 13.15 CFM  at 27 dBA) located on the side of the chassis. This means that the stock AMD heatsink topping the AMD II X4 610e is going to do a lot of work to keep this processor cool under full load.  During our testing, the PC was nearly inaudible at any load but when stressed, CPU temps quickly rose above 64 degrees Celsius making this one toasty little processor. The layout of the chassis would allow LCPC to add an additional fan directly across from the installed fan on the other side of the case. This will contribute to a cooler PC by pushing some fresh air across all of the components instead of relying on pulling air through the ventilation holes on the top and bottom alone. Idle temps were around 22C making this one cool customer under zero load.

Beyond the super cool looks of the LCPC Wind system in the lab, the system comes with the operating system options of:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (32 or 64-bit) Standard
• Windows 7 Professional (32 or 64-bit)
• Ubuntu
• CentOS