Part of our coverage of Mini PCs here at Tom's Hardware often includes fanless PCs— but rarely ones as custom as this build from Reddit user TheJiral, which features a suitably beefy heatsink and an external SSD enclosure running over two USB 4 ports. The heart of this build is the ASRock Industrial Box-7640U Mini PC, which previously used a fanless cooler with a much smaller heatsink. The replacement heatsink, which can be seen as the tallest point of the new build, is the Wakefield-Vette PADLED-13080, which TheJiral acquired from DigiKey.
The build saw the original case being replaced with a 3D printed case, one with vents to the side and lovely use of threaded inserts instead of self tapping screws. We're not sure what 3D printer was used, but it looks like an FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printer was used, perhaps one of the best 3D printers from our list.
As for performance, fortunately, most of the performance characteristics for this build can be determined with some accuracy at just a glance. Based on the specification of the original mini PC and even its name, we can tell this Mini PC is using the low-power Ryzen 5 7640U. This is a CPU aimed at laptops and is somewhat cut down from its big brother Ryzen 7 7840U, but it's still in the upper echelon of iGPU performance thanks to those RDNA3 Compute Units. Unlike 7840U's 12 RDNA3 CUs with the Radeon 780M iGPU, though, the Ryzen 5 7640U only has a Radeon 760M iGPU with 8 RDNA3 CUs.
According to TheJiral, their cooler of choice can handle the Ryzen 5 7640U operating at 28 Watts (near-full utilization) "pretty well".
TheJiral even toggled an overclock option on the ASRock motherboard that enabled a 45 Watt TDP "performance" mode, though this did result in the setup eventually overheating when stress testing CPU cores— thus, overclocking is definitely not happening with this mini PC build. However, the existing results do suggest that just adding a fan or two to this setup might be all it needs to be overclockable, though it's likely not worth sacrificing the aesthetic for a slight performance bump.
The original Reddit thread has some more detailed build information posted by TheJiral, but there unfortunately they doesn't share how the custom shell was made and what inspired it. However, considering their recent Settlers of Catan-themed 3D printing project, it stands to reason that this reportedly-unintentional "retro-futuristic" mini PC components were made the same way.
