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.

Water Cooling at the Show ASUS Motherboards
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  • Tanstafl - Tuesday, June 7, 2005 - link

    #52, the reason they chose to use a PCI slot is most likely because that allows them to use standby power to retain the content of the RAM drive. If you check what's been written about the Gigabyte RAM disk card you will find that the battery is only used when the machine is unplugged, or when there is a power outage.
  • erwos - Friday, June 3, 2005 - link

    "#50, yeah there is another purpose other than power. The PCI slot holds the card in place so it doesn't rock around inside your tower. :)"

    Again, you don't need a PCI slot for that. A mounting bracket would solve that just fine, and possibly even give me room for two in a single 5.25 bay. It's solid state - the thing isn't going to move.
  • mlittl3 - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    #50, yeah there is another purpose other than power. The PCI slot holds the card in place so it doesn't rock around inside your tower. :)
  • erwos - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    My _theory_ is that the PCI bus is used for something other than just power. Maybe some kind of configuration and/or debugging. I find it tough to believe they made this thing use PCI for power alone, because a simple 4-pin would have solved that pretty easily.

    -Erwos
  • KayKay - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    Wow, this was an excellent article, one of the best i've seen to date.

    AGP and PCI-E on the same board, don't see much of that, but im sure people out there would appreciate it if it was widely available
  • nserra - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    #40 What are you talking about I have been installing PC's with ASrock boards (K8 Combo-Z and K8Upgrade-1689) and all super stable and fast (boot time records!!!). I have to say that these are all much faster than the asus boards that I was installing (K8V SE, ...)

    You must have been unlucky, and don’t forget one thing if mobo makers and bios makers put the same affords they do on intel chipsets, I doubt that Uli and Sis looked so bad...
  • jiulemoigt - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    this is wrong pik
    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/200...
    on p9
    http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i...
    there is three dead give aways one which i feel like
    an idiot for missing is the VGA connector and the
    others are the audio jacks are sperated in one pik but not in the cut away and it still supports two ethernet adapters which is also missing in the second pik.
  • Penth - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link

    mosoon:

    You are right with your guess that even the newest and fastest SATA drives fail to max out a SATA I connection. I think my Raptor maxes out at about 70-something MB per second. Not even half the capability of the SATA interface.

    I am supremely interested in this card, but I think if I was going to be paying that much per GB, I would wait for a SATA II connection, where the increase in bandwidth would be very apparent with 300MB/s sustained transfers.
  • monsoon - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link

    MLITTL3 forgive my ignorance, but how does it come that data transfer through the SATA connector is faster when pumped by the i-RAM instead of a SATA HD ?

    i mean, ok, i understand HD access latency is lower, but shouldn't we already have the SATA BUS at its max if we buy some kick ass SATA HD ?

    or is it that SATA HDs around ( including RAPTORS, etc.. ) come nowhere near the bandwidth possibility of the SATA bus ?

    cordially,
    JOHN

    PS - please bear with my ignorance !!!
  • DanDaManJC - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link

    hmmm that ULi mobo, well specifically their chip that allows both agp and pci-express looks awesome!

    I've been waiting around for a solution like that... now all I need is $500 for the rest of the pc... haha *sigh*

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