Computex 2005 Day 2 - ULi's new Athlon 64 Chipset, G70, CrossFire & more

Impressive Cooling from Zalman

A little over a week ago in LA we met up with Zalman after E3 to talk about their new products. Back then they told us that they were working on a new CPU cooler, the 9500, that would offer better cooling than any conventional cooler on the market.

At Computex, Zalman introduced their new cooler:

The heatsink uses 3 heat pipes that are looped around the circular cooler.

Here is a picture of the 9500 in use on an ASUS SLI motherboard:

Like all previous Zalman coolers, the 9500 will be available as both an AMD and Intel cooler.

Zalman was also showing off their TNN 300 chassis, a smaller version of their TNN 500. Like its bigger brother, the TNN 300 is entirely passively cooled using the chassis as a heatsink for the network of heat pipes that runs throughout the case:

Even the power supply is passively cooled; the PSU is contained within the left door of the TNN 300 as you can see from the picture below - the motherboard plugs into the door.

The 350W Power Supply can be seen here, the power supply will power any single GPU graphics card without any problems

Unfortunately, the case will only accept micro ATX motherboards, which will limit its success in the channel market. There have been a number of system builders that have expressed interest in offering Media Center PCs based on the new TNN 300 however.

Below you can see the TNN 300 and the larger TNN 500 in the background:

Like the TNN 500, the 300 will be quite expensive. The current target price is around $800, which is much better than the $1300 that the TNN 500 is selling for but still extremely expensive for a case.

The TNN 300 uses heat pipes to cool the graphics card and CPU as well, so the only component making noise in your system will be your HDD. Like the TNN 500, the TNN 300 is just plain silent.