Date: June 2nd, 2006
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Zalman USA
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INSTALLATION AND TESTING
With the HDD cage screwed down to its standoffs, the rest of the connections made up, and the other components installed, you'll have something that looks like this:
As you can see, the space to the right of the optical drive is a convenient place to stash excess PSU cables. Even with full-size components installed, the HD160 still looks open and uncluttered. The installation, while a bit more challenging than some, was still quite easy and intuitive. For an HTPC case, it's a breeze to work in. I've used Zalman CPU and GPU coolers here because that's what they sent with the HD160 and it's allegedly “optimized” for these coolers. I don't know about that, but the coolers are very good nonetheless. ( TweakNews reviews for the CNPS9500 and VF700 coolers can be found
HERE and
HERE, respectively.)
With all the goodies in the HD160, it's time to fire it up. To take advantage of all the features of this unit, you'll want to use Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 for the operating system. This OS will allow full functionality of the remote control and display, arguably the two best features of the system. If you don't have a copy, an OEM version of MCE is available for around $120 US. There are several tutorials discussing installation of MCE available on the web, so I won't be going into that aspect here, but it's a bit more involved that a “normal” XP install, so the user should do his/her homework. Media Center Edition is a bit finicky about which hardware it likes, so research in this area will pay off as well. Once the power issue I mentioned above was resolved, I had no problems with the hardware or OS.
The thinly disguised Microsoft remote works very well in Media Center .
Even when powered off, date and time are displayed by the VFD. The display dims in this mode
After pressing the “START” button on the remote, Media Center opens and you get a welcome message on the display. Not being the most savvy software guy, I was disappointed to find no instruction manual for the display or remote control.
When playing a CD (or DVD or movie), track information is displayed by the VFD. While I like this feature, the small characters make the display all but unreadable from across the room. You can't hear this unit from across the room, either. In fact, with all fans set to their lowest, you can't hear it at all. The HD160 is silent at 5V and still very quiet at 12V.
My associate, Mr. Bones, volunteered to assist me in checking temperatures inside the case. We measured temps with the fans at minimum and maximum speed and with the top vent open and closed. Ambient temperature was a constant 21C throughout the testing phase. I was pleasantly surprised by the thermal performance of the HD160. I've worked with a few HTPC-type cases in the past and always felt that the design and layout of these units compromise cooling performance. With the HD160, Zalman has shown that, while not on par with a full tower chassis and a bunch of loud fans, cooling can be quite good in a HTPC.
The testbed we used consisted of the following:
AMD Opteron 148 processor
DFI Lanparty UT nF4 SLI-DR motherboard
eVGA 6800XT
GSkill F1-4400DSU2-1GBFC (512mbX 2) memory
Zalman ZM460-460 APS
Western Digital WD800 SATA hard drive
Lite-On CDRW/DVD Combo drive
Temperatures hovered in the 10C above ambient range, which is quite good for a silent HTPC. The only “hot-spot” Mr. Bones was able to find was in the expansion card area. Temps were consistently 4-5C higher in this area than the rest of the case. I suspect that adding another fan in the space provided would go a long way to mitigating this issue. The top vent had little effect on cooling, but this feature may prove more useful with another CPU cooler installed. Unsurprisingly, increasing fan speeds also lowered temps by 1-2C, but at a slight noise penalty. After seeing (actually hearing) how quiet this unit can be, the slightly improved cooling seems a poor trade for the elevated noise level.
