And while I am thinking about it, I occasionally do previews as well. Here is a World Exclusive Preview (haha) for the Swiftech MCWChill TEC-based water chiller:

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/sho...&threadid=8126

Not many pictures, no marketing spiel, not much fanfare, and unfortunately full of useless information (like how it performs) and condescending tone (like unabashed technical discussion). Of course it was only posted in my worklog as the review is a work in progress. That's how things are done here btw; not just talking out of my ass with nothing to back it up. Now it could be complete garbage; only 6700 views which are the real mark of a man.

ah pHaestus, here you go again
you are comparing yourself to their "Watercooling Expert", and he can tell by just looking

and you know that at least 3000 of those pageviews were by me, the Swiftech troll

but I have to ask, of all the piss poor sites out there - why does this one deserve so much commentary ?
- returning to the well known theme; most are not interested in analysis, an opionion of whatever sort is quite sufficient

and yes, they write for their audience - not this one
let it be
do you not recognize that Ben is trolling this site ?

Fair enough Bill. Perhaps I should just implement a redirect on the Pro/forums where when a Nordichardware link is posted that it replaces it with a random link to a site with large breasted women? That should both improve the response to their content and quell any complaints of being too highbrow.

yes, YES, YES
now that is relevant !

BTW, there are some very good looking NORDIC women

See? This is why they pay me the big bucks around here!

Seems that almost every thread I read from here is nothing more than bitching or bashing a product/person.

2 Years ago I loved procooling. You guys were top notch, but ever since then it has gone downhill

There is also a similar forum like this.. called the Hardforums.

Moderators, do as you must, delete this post, ban my ass, whatever.

There is no more reason to read the bullshit that comes from here anymore.

Later/

We don't typically delete, ban, or edit posts (unless flagrant personal attacks are made). Sorry to see you go Maddog and MSCooling. If you find another water cooling site with the same breadth of experience and technical discussion then please let me know. There are a bunch of assholes around here and I have been looking for somewhere else to hang out for a while. :) The overlockers.com.au forums aren't bad and would be my second choice I think after proforums.

Also you know what MSCooling? Hardware websites in general have gone way downhill. The tech sector crash and decline of ad revenues made a lot of sites deperate to find enough money to keep going. And the manufacturers got a lot shrewder in manipulating the online media with NDAs and conditions and only providing products to those that promote. And Joe was as far as I know the first to comment on this publicly a year or so ago to a huge backlash among other webmasters. And that's the same thing we are saying here; hardware sites aren't run for consumers any more but as a marketing tool for mfgrs. It's not a popular thing to say but it's true. And what do we get when we make these comments? People call us bitchy and leave the site to go to places where the opinions of readers don't even matter. Yay logic.l

unfortunately I had to give up my OCAU habit after more than 3 years of posting there
some adept people, a few very much so, but if you criticize one of them
- stand by for they will all gang up to attack the 'attacker'
- the issue becomes quite lost
the Aussies protect their own at the expense of objectivity

MScooling
I have 3 posts in this thread- all fairly mild,
to what were you referring ?
or were you just stirring up some shit ?

I have been here on and off for some years
if you did not like me before, what has changed ?
true, there are several on the hunt all the time (ignore the issue, go after the individual)

and as I type this I see your point
yes, there are proportionally as many dickheads here as on the hard forums
no more argument on that issue

"When someone comments on the quality of writing on your site you make personal attacks. In my experience, people are normally defensive when there is something to hide."

Sure.

"OK... I got a few observations to make.
First. DONT CALL IT A PREVIEW. its a Commercial!
Second. those seem to me to be all Zalman produced PR pics NOT yours. But you say its in hand?
Third. How the **** can you have a "Conclusion" portion of a PREVIEW?! How can you conclude ANYTHING without reviewing it?
I call bullshit by a site desperate to claim a "world exclsuive" on a product that either it doesnt have or isnt allowed by the company to "review" it.
Whats next? Late night infomercials hawking knifes on the Home Shopping network?
Lame."

That made me defensive, call me wicked but it's true. The creator of this great site calls our preview a commercial. Still no one has been able to support that with quotes.
He claims, without any reason or cover, that our nice pictures are from Zalman. He still hasn't said that he's sorry for that.
He wonders how we can have conclusions, instead of reading it. I mean, it's one page long, it doesn't go: 0110100010101, there are real words in it.
He calls it bullshit after having just used bullshit to accuse us on 3 different areas.
He then go on by accusing us of previewing the case without zalman's approval. Why would he say something like that?
Then finally, after some dark prophecy, he calls it lame, without giving any advise or hinting of ways to improve it.

That must actually be the most rude, impolite, offensive and at the same time stupid post ever made by a person. I don't think posts like that should be used to comment on any news people post here. If the Joe the owner write like that though, I guess the rest of you should too.

Still, not a single one of you has yet been able to find any ways to improve the preview, or even ask a question you think you need an answer to. This is the third time I mention it.

I admit that I have been impolite as well, but really, there are limits.

And how does a preview where what is allowed to be said is controlled by a manufacturer differ from an advertisement exactly? People have repeatedly said "some testing would be nice instead of fluff" and you have repeatedly said "we can't do that".

No Bill, i did not mean to quote you, i just needed the "quote" function, my bad..

Boy, you're just going to keep bringing that up, aren't you?

Yes, I can tell, by looking at the innards of a block, if the design is worthy, or if it's a complete waste of milling effort. It really doesn't take a genius to recognize that the design of the block in question, is a very good one: in case you missed it, JayDee's Lemon block is of a similar design, and is an excellent performer. Hoot's "Pin Fin" turned in excellent numbers, or did you forget that you reviewed that one?:rolleyes:

Just for kicks, and for the sake of remembering the "better times", I just went over the thread of the Radius design, again (linked in sig).

Out of all the NH crew, only three tried watercooling, and they gave up. So relatively speaking, yes, I am their water cooling "expert", even if I have yet to finish my own system. They gave me the title, I didn't pick it.


JayDee: the thing is, you really can't do much to a heatpipe, once it's put together, so if any product that uses them comes out, all we can do is watch it. It's not going to outperform anything, no fanless heatpipe solution will: this product is strictly about complete silence, so what's left to ask is: will it perform well enough, without compromising the processor?

As far as I can tell, Zalman has pushed everything to the limits, in eliminating noise, but the performance is definitely not enviable. From my perspective, this case is more of a package of all Zalman efforts. Adding the smallest of fans would probably have a significant impact!

yea you're right Bill; we are being trolled. Just imagine for a moment if Ben's post were replaced with succulent bosoms.

aaaah

Okay, this is Martin from Nordichardware. I am the one that wrote the preview, and I must say that I am a bit upset about what I have read.

I got a call from a distributor in sweden with good contact with Zalman, and they asked if I was interested in writing a review of it.
I immidiatly said yes, and the day that I got it I got a call saying that I was not allowed to make any performance tests because it was only a prototype. I had two choices, either to skip the preview completely or to write it and skip any performance data.
Since I though that many people would be interested in reading my opinions and view some pictures of it, I wrote a large preview where I tried to write everything that I could about the case.
It was obviously a good choise because many people where happy with it and loved reading it.

The only thing that I was not allowed to do was to test the performance, but that does not make it an advertisement. The product IS very good, that should not stop me from posting the preview should it?
I wrote just about every negative aspect that I could think of in that review, the weight, the price, the usage of different size screws, the restriction of natural airflow and so on.

Zalman has thought about nearly everything in this case, so there was not much negative to write about it. Does that make me a bad previewer? Should I concentrate on writing reviews/previews on bad products?

I did not get to keep the case, I did not recieve any money or other priveligies when writing this review and we have no ads/cooperations with Zalman at the moment so how can this review be written in any other purpouse than to share information with the hardware community out there?

And pHaestus, you make it sound as if Zalman controlled our every word. We got one instruction: Do not publice any performance data until the final product is done. Now you may say what you think about Zalmans decision to do that, but do not look down at us because we want to share information with the community.

An advertisement would not contain any bad aspects of the case, if it looked a bit like an ad it could have been because the case actually is a good product?

I'm actually kind of sad about all this, I set aside every project that I had going for five days (girlfriend, modding, other reviews, school) which made my life a bit tougher the days after since I had to work that up, I didn't get to see my girlfriend that week and I get complaints because I took good pictures and reviewed an interesting product, and you write these comments without any hard facts to look down on it?

Hey fair enough Martin. I apologize for anything I said that was perceived as insulting to you. Such was not my intention. If I had been sent a case and then told that I couldnt post performance numbers, then I would have put a teaser up in our forums to get discussion going and to see what sort of tests people would want to have run. That's just my approach though and doesn't necessarily make the nordic hardware "preview everything and then write a review later" approach a bad one. If what you are doing makes you happy then by all means keep it up. Some actually enthused enthusiasts would be a nice change of pace.

I am pretty clearly not ANYONE'S target audience as when I write reviews and articles they are full mostly of useless info and technical gobbledygook. That's why you guys post the big page hits and I just sit here and snipe and whine.

So don't take what I say too seriously.

Well just because I run the site doesnt mean I will stand back and let people post crap and not get their ass chewed if it's nothing more than web fluff. Yeh I run a website, but I also am a customer of many websites, and call "bullshit" when I see it.

The fact procooling isnt a business for me, its just something that happens in the background of my normal life gives me little pause when speaking out about some thing. As pH posted, we have pissed off thousands of people in the past, including hundreds of webmasters. But EVERY single bitch and gripe has been done to the benifit of the readers of that site. Asking for more detail, asking for less PR fluff, and trying to get websites to function indepedently of corporate Marketing depts. But when thats done, the readers of that site freak out cause as I have found... the general web population seems to be prefectly happy being sold to the highest bidder and marketing companies when it comes to paid reviews, and results.

I called bullshit because I dont even believe you have the Zalman in your possession. You had not one peice of info in the review that didnt seem straight from zalmans PR handouts. All the pics looked like ZAlman PR shots also. MANY MANY sites have posted reviews and "previews" about items that they dont even have. Just got some pics from the MFG and posted the info the mfg gave them. Your site from the past works doesnt have the credibility for anyone to think what you post is true or the real deal. Please prove me wrong on the alegations.

It is a damn fine peice of advertisement though I am guessing Zalman is awful happy.

possibly the only constructive post in this thread (?);
when you get one you can test and report on, give it a go

Joe you'll get nowhere with arguing with Ion. He's best left on the ignore list.

Martin perhaps you could take a picture of the Zalman prototype with your hand giving us the finger as well? That should satisfy Joe :)

Something I'd much rather discuss with you people, is this:

This case is sure to quiet, or to be on the safe side, more quiet than most other cases. The performance we do not know yet, but we can guess that it won't rock your world.

So, why don't we cut this shit and try to think of ways to improve it? I'll go first and then you can follow if you like to.

From what I have learned, what's limiting the performance here should be:
(a. the transfer of heat from the source of heat to the side panels. Also, the side panels may be too warm to make the difference in temperatures big enough to produce good performance. That lead us in on;
(b. the heatsinks on the sides maybe aren't large or good enough.

I think you can see what I mean, though it might not be the 100% scientific truth. You are more than welcome to add or correct.

I can think of ways to deal with these problems:
(a. Improve on the transfer by using peltiers, watercooling (from heat source to side panels) or a compressor (same there).
The case could probably not handle peltiers, but what do I know. What I find interesting though would be a very silent compressor, the source of heat does not have to be -40 degrees celsius, +30 would be rather good compared to a lot of other cooling solutions. Using a waterpump could probably also provide a better and silent solution.
(b. The solutions above are written thinking that the side panels can actually handle the extra stress, perhaps they cannot, perhaps they can. A way to improve performance would be to increase the surface area of the heatsinks on the sides. Adding fans should work just as good of course, but remember the goal being a silent case.

Now, I may be totally wrong, but I think that this is a good way of dealing with news.
If you prefer to discuss what I just wrote here instead of us having this endless battle, I'd be more than happy to learn more about the case, and hopefully we will be able to provide the people out there with a better review when we write one.
What do you say?

That's exactly the kind of personal attack that's driving people away from here (but hey, what do I know!).

I think pHaestuis is on the right track: we all need a better sense of humor. ;)


I think Zalman ought to have concentrated on fitting a fan, and isolating that noise, instead of (or as well as) going with a massively large heatsink.

I have three comments:

1) we are whiny elitist pricks with nothing worthwhile to contribute until you need something and then we are supposed to just work together? Well...ok sure sounds like a good idea! We can improve your reviews and you can shit all over us in your comments!

2) There's the law of conservation of something or other at work when you try to cool the heatpipes by using TECs or water or phase change on the outside of the case. If you think about it, if it were possible to use TECS or phase change or water silently to cool the load delivered by the heatpipes, then one would not use the heatpipes and enormous aluminum case in the first place. One would just directly use the superior cooling silently. We've seen many times that this doesn't work acceptably. And so you are stuck with fans and then introducing noise. This totally negates any advantage of the Zalman case over the quiet watercooled rig I am currently running. I would start if temps are high by just pointing a box fan at the case :)

3) This brings up some interesting review questions that I had when looking at this case.
a) What about the really hot bits on motherboards that don't contain heatsinks and that are normally cooled by airflow? MOSFETS are a prime example. Some motherboards now have heatsinks for these but many do not and rely on exhaust fans. There are a lot of other hotspots (70C+ in normal cases with air cooling) on motherboards that will run at god knows what temperature now. Is this only a problem with overclockers? Not sure.
b)Prescott CPUs are said to push 100-120W STOCK next year; are readers buying another Kryotech case (extremely expensive solution that doesn't really travel with them to the next generation of chips). That's a lot of heat for a passive heatpipe solution. This goes directly to Bill's question: what is the heat capacity for each component?
c) How difficult is it going to be to actually test this case when all the cooling is supplied by air moving around the case? Wouldn't any change in not just air temperature but also air current and direction affect temps of all the components? Hell trying to get stable radiator temperatures with fans is a pita; this sounds much more difficult to me.

I haven't got the case in my possession now, but I can give you an unedited picture of the case that I found in my temp-folder that I used during the review. I have plenty of these, so if you need more to trust me just post a link and I'll upload them :)
The images are at http://www.nordichardware.se/noddis/proof.jpg
http://www.nordichardware.se/noddis/proof2.jpg

When I get the real case I'll try to measure the temperature gradiants that occur, the temperature of the individual blocks and the heatpipe to see how efficient the system really is. I'll have to read your posts again to make sure that I didn't miss any question. Anyway, there's some images for you :)

seems quite clear that Martin did actually have a unit

but I am appaled at the number of low-grade thermal interfaces that will be involved in each heat path
- truly terrible efficacy to be expected
this box will need to be left out in the snow

Cool Thanks Noddan, I am VERY happy to be proven wrong on that part!