Williams Pelegrin
Intel’s newest NUC designs have been a hit for the company, as big-name computer makers like CyberPowerPC and Razer are working on compatible desktop cases. Now you can add Akasa, which has been offering fanless Next Unit of Computing (NUC) cases for several years. At CES, the company is showing off its new Venom QX chassis.
The Venom QX is Akasa’s first actively-cooled NUC case, with enough room for three 8 cm fans to keep the system running cool. You’ll need the cooling if you want to take advantage of the available space—you can fit up to a 300 mm graphics card. By comparison, Intel’s Ghost Canyon NUC has room for up to 203 mm graphics cards.
Taking a tour around the Venom QX, the case has an 800 W SFX power supply, a backplane with three PCIe slots for use with a dual-slot graphics card, two regular USB ports on the front, and a 2.5-inch drive bay to fit a hard drive or SSD. The front panel is made out of plastic, while the rest of the case made out of aluminum.
Rounding things out, the Venom QX is compatible with Intel’s NUC 9 Pro and NUC 9 Extreme Compute Elements. It also supports the West Cove Board Element. Thanks to the case’s large size, there’s enough space for a Compute Element, Board Element, and the aforementioned discrete dual-slot graphics card.
Akasa didn’t announce when, where, and for how much the Venom QX will launch. If you want a fanless alternative to the Venom QX, the Turing QX and Galileo QX cases, which support the new NUCs, will be available by the end of March.
