Librem Mini Teardown

I’m having so much fun messing around with this little computer. Today I recorded a teardown video.

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There you go, @reC, if you want to know where the battery for the RTC chip is … too easy :slight_smile: - and if you can’t get it back together again, you can ask @morgan or watch the video in reverse. :slight_smile:

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Super Video. Very informative to get a look inside the Librem Mini and with a pleasant voice. Thanks for sharing this here :slightly_smiling_face:

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And he even took heed of my comment about the QR code. :wink:

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and when the day comes when there’s no intel-ME active code inside the SOC, it will be a PC … but close enough (we belive) still :wink:

maybe edit your post to include it as a text hyperlink as well …
here it is > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=493WEM25Kqo

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Excellent overview of the hardware.

I really wish we had a guide to explain how to flash the BIOS chips for the Librem 13/14/15/Mini.

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the copper base-plate that makes contact with the intel-SOC (CPU+iGPU) of the cooler-assembly seems like it’s what makes heat dissipate evenly over a large area inside the tiny case (a lil’ bigger than a standard NUC case). i’m glad Purism decided to use copper for the plate but it would have been even better if copper FINS were used as well together with a PWM(4-PIN) based cooler-connector solution.

a magnetic-levitation-fan would have been great for endurance and noise-pressure. Apple is really good at this but it’s too bad it has a closed-source ecosystem. see what they’ve been able to achieve with the new Apple-Mini-M. unreal.

returning to our sheep. the storage-disks are somewhat affected by this semi-passive-heat-dissipation mechanism. as such the drives from the ‘upper’ floor are absorbing heat emanated from the ‘first’ floor that is the ONLY one with active-cooling capability.

my SATA-3 m2 (80mm) internal drive is almost always reported as 46-47 degree Celsius (even when idle). i’m curious if the situation with an NVME drive will be the same in the v2.

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i’m glad Purism decided to use copper for the plate but it would have been even better

As far as I know the hardware wasn’t designed by Purism (unlike their laptops). It’s an off the shelf MiniPC that they bought wholesale and applied their own branding and software changes.

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I’ve started the process of putting the Mini into a fanless chassis. Here you can see the 3D printed protoype adapters I’m using for the motherboard mount, heatsink, and IO Shield.

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We document the software flashing process using our utility script here: https://source.puri.sm/coreboot/utility

If you want lower level flashrom commands you can look at the script for a guide.

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are you trying to liquid cool that baby-monster ?

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I would guess “no”. You don’t normally go fanless in order to put in liquid cooling.

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maybe he wants to overclock that petite-monster :wink: i’d be curious how one would tweak the BIOS settings on the LMini though …

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Well I’m using heatpipes so technically it could be called “liquid cooled” but I think most people would refer to it as passive cooling. The entire case is a giant heatsink and there are no additional moving parts required for cooling so it’s completely silent.

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you could also have fully-passive-liquid-cooling (i.e no fans running, except for the pump) … but you’d be somewhat limited in overclocking potential :wink:

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I’m not trying to overclock so no problem there :slight_smile: I’m just waiting now to get the parts manufactured in aluminium (especially the heatsink adapter as the plastic version would melt) then I’ll make a video assembling the whole thing.

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However, if you were going for a little liquid cooling setup, I’d be really interested in seeing that. Either fanless or with a high quality ultra quiet fan that’s set to turn on only above certain temperatures.
:wink:

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by the way that red looks sexy :wink:

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New IO plate in aluminium, fresh off the water jet!

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These adapters should be with me in the next couple of days and I can finally start putting it together!

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