AirJet has found an early adopter in the form of Zotac which just announced it will sell an AirJet-cooled mini-PC for $499 by the end of this year.

Frore CEO Seshu Madhavapeddy pointed out that while there was nothing ground breaking about the Zotac box (which will do what it says on the tin) because of its cooling it can handle a 7W Intel Core i3-N300 processor that nominally runs at 800MHz, with onboard graphics. All this would be tricky in a box and price its size.

Madhavapeddy said that the device works by using vibrating membranes inside the chip. When they vibrate they create a suction force that pulls air from the top through the dust guard into the inlet vents, and then pushes it down at very high velocities, and that high velocity air impinges on the copper heat spreader at the bottom of the chip. It get saturated with heat by extracting heat from the copper heat spreader and then it exits sideways.

He added that it created 1750 pascals of backpressure, ten times that of a fan. This enables a completely dustproof PC with integrated filters over its only openings.

It’s so powerful it can cool other components in a PC by sucking air past them, with a single AirJet Pro supposedly enough to cool a 15W Steam Deck handheld gaming PC despite offering a net heat dissipation of just 8.75W — the rest of the cooling comes passively because the skin of the device is just that much cooler with the AirJet’s breeze jetting past. All this is done on 1W of power.

The system is not really designed for every kind of PC and it requires dedicated control circuitry that has to be integrated into a system’s motherboard.