Leaning into this year’s trend of efficiency, the PC cooling eggheads at Arctic are capping off 2024 with a new passively-cooled mini PC called Senza. Designed to be compact and sit underneath your desk without making a peep, it looks like the ideal solution for offices and home workstations, with the possibility of light gaming if we’re lucky.
Ditching fans surprisingly hasn’t come at the expense of hardware. While Arctic Senza leans on components that are a couple of generations old, namely Ryzen 5000 APUs with Radeon RX Vega integrated graphics, they’re more than capable in today’s technological climate without the added thermal overhead.
Senza’s standout feature is its design, which prioritises workspace efficiency. Mounting underneath your desk, it effectively removes the need for a desktop PC tower and reduces visible clutter. Arctic even includes a combination of clamps, hoses, and a power brick holder to keep cable management neat.
The entire chassis serves as a cooling mechanism, with no moving parts. Music to my ears, this eliminates noise, reduces wear and tear, and mitigates technical woes with fewer points of failure.
Most of the I/O resides on the main unit, including 2.5Gb LAN, dual USB 2.0, two USB 3.2, 3.5mm audio in and out, as well as your DC power port. You’ll also have your choice of HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2 for visuals, which are plenty for a single 5K2K display or dual monitors at 4K resolution, each at 60Hz.
You’ll need to map out your connected peripherals ahead of time to avoid banging your head under your desk. After all, fail to prepare, and you prepare to fail. Fortunately, those tendrils emanating from the main unit connect to a front panel that’s far more accessible. Here, you have your power button, an audio combo jack, and two USB 3.2 ports: one Type-A and the other Type-C. These come in handy for external hard drives and connecting digital cameras.
Unless we’re talking about modern gaming mice, I’ll always stick to my guns that wired is better than wireless. That said, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 are on-hand to ditch the need for cables entirely. I’d like to have seen an extender of sorts considering Senza lives under thick desks, but I can’t judge it until I try it for myself.
Picking the right one
Given the compact nature of Senza at just 536 x 180 x 50mm (LxWxH), Arctic pre-installs the hardware for you with no upgrade path. This makes it even more important to select the right components right off the bat, and it comes in three configurations: the €700 Senza 5700G, €730 Senza 5700G Pro, and €600 Senza 5500GT
Senza 5700G and 5700G Pro are largely identical, with the only difference being the operating system – Windows 11 Home for the former and Windows 11 Pro for the latter. Otherwise, the specs are led by an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 5700G processor at 4.6GHz, Radeon 8 integrated graphics, 32GB DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM memory, and a 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen 3 SSD.
Keeping the same storage, Senza 5500GT otherwise scales things back a bit. The model drops to a six-core Ryzen 5 5500GT CPU at 4.4GHz, Radeon 7 graphics, and 16GB of the same DDR4 memory. Not an earth-shattering compromise considering the €100 difference.
I want one
While I’d love to see a gaming version of Arctic Senza, if it’s even possible, I’m still in awe at an all-passive rig of this calibre. AMD Ryzen 7 5700G can already out-muscle a mobile Ryzen 7 6800U nestled inside OneXPlayer 2, giving it some serious potential. Still, Arctic doesn’t market this as a gaming device of any sort. Instead, it’s primary aim is to deliver a plug-and-play system for office work without dominating your desk space.
I’ve seen plenty of PCs try to squirrel away from sitting on the desk, but they usually demand use of your monitor’s VESA mount. As someone who will always pop my displays on an arm, that’s never been an option. Instead, Senza widens compatibility with a more elegant solution, and it doesn’t require proprietary equipment, like Secretlab’s magnetic desk. All it requires are a few holes to secure itself.
If performance holds up, it potentially heralds a quiet age in computing without risk of coil whine, PWM signal interference, or fans fluctuating to combat perceived temperatures. Just pure, uninterrupted silence, sans the clicks and clacks of keyboards around you.
