Review on Akasa Plato Fanless Generation NUC23 M1B: The Ultimate Silent Cooling Solution for NUC23 M1B by Jeff Swan

I bought this for the 5th gen i7 NUC cooler. Judging by the reviews of this little monster, it gets very hot in a standard case , and the fan revs up a lot and gets pretty loud. I wouldn't know; I ordered this along with the i7 and when they arrived I immediately pulled the i7 NUC motherboard out of the stock housing. Assembly was a breeze but beware there are no extra washers/screws. So if you drop something, you'll have to contact Akasa for another one. My only issue is that the connectors on the back of the case aren't quite aligned; I was able to plug everything in very firmly, but the HDMI port would be unusable in its current configuration. I don't know if/how it can be configured. All screws are tight. In the best design, the motherboard would be placed in the middle of the case with extensions for the back (like we have with front panel connectors). Maybe it could have some extra USB ports or a microSD card slot, but for now that's all I want. I cleaned both the CPU and the part of the case that comes in contact with the CPU with isopropyl alcohol. I added a thin coat of Arctic Silver paste to the processor. The system started without problems; latest workstation Fedora 23. At room temperature (I'm on the equator) the CPU cores are between 30 and 36 degrees Celsius. m.2 SSD reads at 34 degrees Celsius. Under heavy load (all CPUs processing 100% BOINC datasets, a Windows 10 VM with updates and also a CentOS VM) the CPU reached 74 degrees C and the SSD up to 50 degrees C. Again, I don't know how it compares to a system in a traditional case, but the processor's thermal limit appears to be 105 degrees Celsius; This case has nothing of the sort. When I type this right now and run the dnf update, the CPU is 36 degrees C, the SSD is 34 degrees C. The system runs continuously for 24 hours with no heat issues. The case feels a bit warm under full load. Build quality is excellent, although fingerprints were collected during assembly, but this is a very minor complaint. I may update this later if anything changes. Great build, slight design ping as no adjustable back can be used meaning all ports are misaligned and the HDMI port is unusable. Would buy it again with great pleasure.