AirJet teardown: See inside the solid-state cooling revolution

One of the most exciting new technologies we’ve seen this year is Frore Systems’ AirJet, a device that can cool PC components and other electronics using a super-thin, solid-state build with no moving parts. The initial device was shown off at CES at the beginning of the year, but at Computex in Taiwan Gordon and Adam got a chance to peek under the hood and see what makes the AirJet tick. Or not tick, I guess, but vibrate membranously on a tiny bit of power. You know what I mean.

If you haven’t been following our coverage, the Airject uses several layers of exotic materials and precision geometry to vibrate tiny membranes, intaking air, blowing it over a copper heat spreader, and exhausting it at up to 200 kilometers per hour. A tiny AirJet Mini unit, about the size of a few postage stamps, can replace an active cooler ten times its size and many times its 2.8mm thickness.

Gordon’s teardown demonstration lets you see all the pieces that go into an AirJet unit, showing just how tiny it is — and most of it is the copper heat spreader surrounding the microjets sealed under the casing. Millimeter-thin portions of the material design allow the expelled air to mix with cooler air, preventing an uncomfortable blast of heat from annoying the user.

What does the AirJet look like when used in a real product? AirJet maker Frore Systems has a demo to show how it can work on an M.2 SSD, which is where a lot of the extreme cooling needs are showing up these days. An external drive equipped with two AirJet Minis, compared to the same Sabrent retail design with passive cooling, shows a huge improvement in cooling while being used. The AirJet-equipped drive was 55 degrees Celsius (131 Fahrenheit) under load, with slightly better read and write performance, versus a toasty 68 degrees C (154 F) on the passively cooled drive.

The first retail product scheduled to ship with AirJet cooling is the Zotac Zbox PI430AJ (the AJ stands for AirJet!), which PCWorld also checked out at a Computex. We’ve visited Frore Systems for an AirJet lab tour, too. For the latest news on the world of PC components, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube.