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Zalman HD160 HTPC Enclosure Review

Cases & PSU/Cases by piotke @ 2006-03-16

With the HD160 Zalman is expanding their product range, this HTPC enclosure is of high quality and aims to deliver a good balance between cooling and noise generation; it has support for full size ATX motherboards, and comes with a VFD display and Windows Media Center remote control.

Stress Testing

Noise / Performance testing

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD sempron 64 2600+ @ 2 Ghz
Mainboard	Albatron K8 Ultra
HDD	Maxtor 250 gig
VGA	Albatron GF4 MX480
Memory	2*512 Mb A-Data Vitesta DDR600
Optical	Nec 2500 DVD writer

All results were taken with room temperature at ~20°C. Due to room temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-2°C of inaccuracy from obtained results. Please keep this in mind when looking at the results.

Noise level of each fan was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A. The sensor was placed ~65cm away from the front of the case. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was ~37,8 dBA.

System was stressed by running Prime95 for 60min (after Thermal Compound’s burn-in). Speedfan was used to log maximum obtained temperatures.

Arctic Silver kindly send us their “Lumière” thermal testing compound which has the same color as Ceramique, requiring a mere 30-minute of break-in time!

Madshrimps (c)

As you can see the case fans have a severe impact on the case cooling. Using them at 5 volt they barely produce any noise, but drop the overall system temperature considerably. Using them at full speed you can see an increase of 3-4dBA but the benefit in cooling simply doesn’t justify this noise increase.

You can also see in the graphs that the hard disks temperature is related to the temperature of the VGA card. This can be easily explained. The Zalman VF700-cu cooler produces an airflow that reaches, and thus cools, the disk.

Overall I can conclude from these results that the difference between using the fans at 12v versus 5v is not striking, but the drop in noise can clearly be noticed.

Quick Power Supply Test

Madshrimps (c)

Even while stressed this PSU remains very stable. Please do keep in mind that we weren't pushing this PSU to the max as we were using a rather light setup.

460Watt for a HTPC is more than enough since you’re not going to run SLI/Crossfire. The system used today is not high end and the PSU has no trouble keeping all voltage rails well within specifications.

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