Turemetal is a new fanless PC component company based in Shanghai. It is a one-man operation, with design, management, assembly, and promotion all being handled by Mical Wong. The DP2 is designed similarly to the discontinued UP2. The UP2 was compatible with Thin-Mini ITX motherboards only. Thin-Mini ITX motherboards are becoming rare, so it made sense to transition to a Mini ITX case. This forced him to increases the size a bit, which also helped the passive cooling. The recommended power limit for the UP2 was 55 W. For the DP2, it is 80 W. Of course I wanted to test this limit myself. The build process was documented in the video below:
For testing I chose the Intel i9-9900K, the Gigabyte H370N ITX motherboard, 16 GB of 3200 MHz RAM from Crucial, a 500 GB Crucial P1 NVMe drive, and a 150 W Pico PSU. The 9900K allowed me to alter power limits as I please and push the case to its limits. It is not recommended for most users of this case.
With the first round of testing, I set power limits to 65 W and ran 16 threads of Prime95‘s torture test for half an hour. The average maximum core temperatures across the 8 cores was 89 °C, certainly within limits. I then lowered power limits to 45 W to see how that affected things. After another half hour of Prime95, the maximum temperatures were 78 °C. I then increased limits to 75 W, and finally, some but not all cores had begun to thermally throttle themselves at 99 °C, just before the 30 minute mark. I would put the DP2’s limit at half way between 65 and 75 W, at 70 W. So is Turemetal’s recommendation of 80 W safe? Sure, if you don’t plan to run power viruses like I was! 80 W power limits would be okay. To be on the safe side though, I would recommend 70 W.
For its size, 70 W of passive cooling is excellent. Turemetal’s DP2 falls right in line with HDPlex’s H1, Streacom’s FC8, and Akasa’s Euler MX. At less than 4 liters in size, the DP2 is the smallest of this bunch. It accomplishes this with a few very creative unique features. One of these features is a third heatsink hidden in the front of the case. Four 8 mm heatpipes connect the CPU to the two heatsinks that make up the sides of the case. A fifth heatpipe connects one of the side heatsinks to the front heatsink.
A second unique feature is a double decker CPU heat block design. This allows you to increase the height of the heatpipes above the motherboards on one side of the CPU. This way you can use just about any Mini ITX motherboard, even one with large MOSFET or M.2 heatsinks. I wanted to make sure that this heatpipe riser feature did not hurt thermals, so I tested the case with and without it, and temperatures were the same either way.
A third unique feature is a removable aluminum plate on the bottom of the case, just below the location of an M.2 slot on many motherboards. This allows you to easily swap an M.2 drive without disassembling the heatpipes and removing the motherboard.
These features can be very helpful, and I have to commend Turemetal for including them. Overall, the Turemetal DP2 is a beautiful case that is able to successfully cool up to 70 W from the CPU. It is the smallest case that I know of that is able to achieve this. At about $230 for a case and cooling solution, it is not he most cost-effective option, but if silence is key, and you don’t need any PCIe cards, this heatsink-case might be the perfect solution. It is available from taobao.com, or as a complete PC with your choice of components right here at fullysilentpcs.com.
