I’ve been mounting my desktop PCs under my desk for years because it’s a great way to free up space and avoid cable issues, especially when you’re using a standing desk like I do.
But a German company has made an itty-bitty desktop PC that can truly disappear down there, mounted directly to the underside of the desk itself and protruding only just a couple of inches — and this silent, fanless machine is powerful enough to handle full Windows 11.
Arctic is a smaller company, but it’ll be familiar to you if you keep abreast of the latest in desktop PC cooling. The Senza Under Desk PC is a full desktop PC design, albeit a not-especially-powerful one. The housing looks a little like a server blade, but it’s designed to be screwed directly into the underside of your desk and essentially disappear. It even has a separate box for the PC’s front-facing inputs and power/reset buttons, which can be installed at the front edge of the desk for easy operation. Cables can be run along the underside of the desk, too.
Arctic
The Senza is also designed to be silent, with passive cooling for both the CPU and power supply and a separate M.2 cooler applied to the SSD. Cool air comes in from the bottom of the unit and warm air exits out the vents at the top… which might make your mousepad a little warm, depending on how thick your desk is.
Just don’t expect to break any benchmark records without fans for cooling. The Senza starts with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500GT, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and 1TB of storage. You can upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5700G or 5700G Pro, both with 32 gigs of RAM, but that’s it.
This isn’t an entirely new idea. We’ve seen desks that can hold PC components inside, essentially turning the entire desk into a massive PC case. But Arctic’s solution is a lot easier to build and apply to an existing desk, not to mention cheaper. According to FanlessTech, it’ll cost about €600 (approximately $634) for the base model, which seems fair for all this custom design.
That said, I’d be more excited for a modular approach that gives you the option of applying that passive cooling setup to your own build, albeit with some obvious limits on parts for the sake of thermal management.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.