The case was designed to have two columns, and one side was dedicated to fitting a full sized graphics card. The other column was the rest of the computer.
The graphics card had its own fan system, but I also needed a fan glued to the CPU and then an extra one at the bottom to help spit out exhaust. The thing ran so hot, and the cords ended up just jammed into the case where they fit.
I had no experience with building PCs and was amazed I could fit a 2TB Hard drive in a tiny little stick on the motherboard, whereas X amount of years before, I would have had to install a spinning disk, much bigger. Such a huge leap forward.
The main reason I wanted this form factor was because the perceived elegance of it appealed to me. But it became clear to me through the process that "small form factor" for enthusiasts is usually more about the challenge of building in a tight space. The thing is super loud with the fans and runs super hot when using it for gaming, even with a 1080ti card.
That's one of the reasons Apple's progress with CPUs is so great to me. I don't want the entire industry to move to SoC style where everything is soldered to the motherboard, but the more efficient you can make the rest of the computer, the better cooling system you can design. Just like the M.2 form factor for SSDs was a huge leap. But even if you can't eliminate the need for active cooling, something like this would make things a lot better. I think you'd still have to design around where the exhaust blows out though.
I think it'd be better to have the ARM increase in efficiency and then maybe combine it with something like this for extra powerful models, the way graphics cards are sold with the fans attached.
Someday I'd like to be able to upgrade the build and optimize it. The dream would be to not have any fans, but some other form of active cooling, and for the machine to be basically silent, while packing a 3090+ tier graphics card.
Through overzealous cleaning I broke the fans on my Ryzen 4800HS laptop but with the right fan-control software even that TSMC 7nm CPU operated largely fanless(they only spooled up above 80°C, which was rare) until replacements came in the mail.
The M1 in the Air is throttled to roughly half the TDP of other devices with the same chip, so it's not like you're getting all the performance it can offer.
That being said Apple's design is somewhat faster than competition using the same lithography.
Throttling only kicks in on the M1 Air when the CPU has been running full tilt for ~10m. Outside of that it performs identically the the regular M1 in a Mac Mini, iMac, or 13" MBP.
Even a lot of heavy users rarely keep the CPU pegged for that long. Most workloads are instead short and bursty. There's stuff like compiling Chromium that'll do it, but people who do that regularly should probably be looking at something like a 14" M1/M2 Pro MBP instead if portability is a priority.