[HNJohnC]

When are we going to move away from mechanical fans for cooling? They seem to be the weakest link in every board that has a fan on it and die a horrible noisy death at some point way before you expect and they're noisy even when they're new. Surely they can design better?

[snarfy]

We have better tech, but it's not cheap. Fans are cheap.

[wjoe]

Given that the same SoC is used in the Nvidia Shield tablet, it definitely can be cooled without a fan. I guess that wasn't their priority for the developer board, or it would have made it harder to fit in the various I/O interfaces.