X-bit labs

Zalman HD160 HTPC System Case Review (page 8)

Category: Multimedia

by Vasily Melnik

[ 03/23/2006 | 06:32 PM ]

You have to remove the top part of the cage to install your hard drives, though:

Then you put the drive into an empty bay and fix it with the top cover:

Unfortunately, Zalman couldn’t invent anything better than Thermaltake used in its own HTPC case series:

It’s strange that engineers of leading companies can’t yet find a more compact solution to send power to the VFD in standby mode. But as we noted in our earlier review, you can correct the issue with a soldering iron in less than 5 minutes.

We took a CNPS 9500 LED cooler, also recommended by Zalman, for our tests of the HD160 system case (you can read more about this cooler in a dedicated article called First Look at Zalman CNPS9500 LED: the Power of Air, the Efficiency of Water):

This cooler fitted perfectly into our test system:

The case seems to have been designed exactly for this cooler as there is less than a millimeter of space left between the cooler and the top cover when you put the latter down. The assembled system looks quite neatly:

There’s enough of room to tuck the excess cables into. We put unused power cables behind the optical drive cage. Now that the system is assembled, we can play with its software part.