MSI’s new 11.6-inch Atom laptop is passively cooled

By Jon Martindale June 14, 2015

msi s120 laptop atom fanless msis120 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Laptops are great for many things, be it watching Netflix on the toilet, or doing some work on the train, but one thing they are almost unanimously terrible at is cooling. That’s not their fault of course. As consumers, we demand high performance and long battery life in a light shell, so developers cram all of that impressive hardware into a tiny space. That makes moving air over the components to cool them rather difficult.

That won’t be a problem in the upcoming MSI S120, however, as its minuscule chassis won’t require any form of active cooling at all. That means it’s going to be essentially silent, because by bundling in NAND flash memory for the storage and taking advantage of a low-power Intel CPU, there are limited thermal exhaust needs.

Along with that dead silence, you’ll also have some reasonable performance too. It isn’t going to run the latest AAA games at 4K, but it does come with 2GB of memory, up to 64GB of flash storage, and one of the Intel Atom chips released early last year, the Z3735F Bay Trail. Liliputing doesn’t brief us on what the stock display resolution will be, but we do know that MSI is planning to offer at least a limited number of the new MS S120s with 1080p IPS panels.

The laptop, pictured by Notebook Italia at the recent Computex show in Taiwan, will weigh in at 2.2 pounds and will measure just 0.6 inches thick. The general consensus is that it will come with Windows 10, so chances are its unannounced launch date will be sometime after the end of July, when the new OS officially hits the digital shelves.

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