Kubb builds 13kg solid gold fanless mini PC priced near $1.7 million

The computer was assembled to order by Kubb for a customer in Europe, according to a TechRadar report. The machine was first flagged by FanlessTech and subsequently covered by VideoCardz.

It is a gold version of the Kubb Fanless, a 120mm cube that uses no active cooling and therefore runs silently. The standard model of that machine has an aluminum chassis; substituting gold pushes the weight to more than six times that of the aluminum case.

TechRadar put the price at roughly $1.7 million, or about £1.3 million and AU$2.4 million, close to the market value of the gold it contains, and described the figure as equivalent to the cost of about 60 new cars.

Kubb's Fanless line is normally offered with up to an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H or an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 processor and up to 128GB of DDR5 memory. TechRadar noted that the buyer may have requested a different specification, and the exact configuration of the gold unit was not disclosed.

The choice of material is not purely decorative. FanlessTech pointed out that gold conducts heat about 30 percent better than aluminum, which could improve passive cooling in a machine that relies on its case rather than fans to disperse heat.

TechRadar also framed the purchase as a possible investment rather than only a display piece, noting that the price of gold has risen sharply since the pandemic and that the buyer, presumably wealthy, may have had that in mind. The publication stated that its comments were not offered as investment advice.

For context, TechRadar observed that PC prices have been climbing amid a memory shortage, and that even a high-end build using an RTX 5090 graphics card costs far less than this gold machine.