They don't seem to care about needing a fan, and the community on their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who don't want a fan (the zeitgeist there seems to believe that any compromise to performance at all costs is incompetence). It is particularly frustrating as you don't even have to go ARM to drop the fan: there are chips even from Intel that do not need fans, such as any of the ones in all of the 12" laptops I have used for the past dozen or so years (including the one I am using right now, which also happens to have a much much better screen than this new Framework: a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 360, whose only flaw is it doesn't have enough RAM).
So they're exactly like the gaming PC community. "Decibels aren't a benchmark", as an enthusiast acquaintance says. If you want to go fanless, you need to go to a silent PC community. Where their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who do want a fan.
There are a lot of more or less weird, very dedicated, very opinionated subcultures in the PC hardware world.
The issue is kind of on the other side, though: you can pay more to improve your cooling in a way that might be quieter or better; but, if you absolutely do not want any fan noise--nor any fragile mechanical motors to move air/water/oil/ether/whatever--you get to a point where money can't buy better cooling... you simply have to put up with less cooling, with less powerful chips that have lower thermal bounds and often simply aren't fast. Like, I don't buy a computer because it is fast, and as soon as a company starts telling me how fast their computer is I start bemoaning the lost battery life and certainty of a noisy active cooling solution that I don't want :(.
I recall a video from Gamers Nexus at a trade event, though only that it was sometime roughly within the last year.
Entirely passive (I THINK / recall there was no pump), heat based circulation, with just TONS of radiator surface and an unwieldy design. However for that entirely custom solution they could theoretically scale up with additional size.
Still, if someone's going _that_ overboard, the heat's getting dumped somewhere.
'Industrial Chilled Water' as in a connection to an external (to the room, maybe even building) pump, and an external cooler (usually evaporative cooling, could be mega radiators in the shade too) like you see at industrial sites.
Totally fair, but I'd argue the water-cooled crowd is another, distinct sub-culture with it's own goals (e.g. silent is nice, but getting the highest overclock is nicer). Just like the nitrogen cooled and SLIC guys are scratching a slightly different itch. And, FWIW...there's probably 10 Noctuas within 20' of me; they are wonderfully quiet, but I think those calling them 'silent' are not quite accurate, YMMV.
