The heat pipes are a lot more efficient than a passive water circulation system.

Heat pipes work by phase change, the boiling of the working fluid in the pipe removes a lot of heat. The density of the gas is way lower than that of liquid, so it can carry away heat much faster than liquid only in a passive system.

If they plan the case well, they can get some amount of airflow by convection.
The Apple cube is only 8x8x8 and it dissipates about 45W by convection alone.
Upgraded Cubes do need fans though. If the cube was larger or had better airflow and heat transfer through the case, it could dissipate more heat.
At least that's Powerlogix's plan with thier aluminum case replacement.

The Zalman case is about silence, get the overclocking out of your mind, it wont work for that. If anything you will probably need to UNDER-clock a bit to keep things running well. It wont do Dual Opterons with a 10KRPM RAID array.

There is a good sized market for Quiet over fast and cool. Zalman's niche is in that space. They better get moving on this design before some other case maker beats them to market.

You should write marketing for Zalman Starman:

"My computer crashes even at stock speeds" was successfully spun to:

"If anything you will probably need to UNDER-clock a bit to keep things running well."

Silent, Cool, Fast...
Pick Two..

actually its Silent,Cool, or Cheap

Heh.. but here, none of it's cheap..

Overclocked Opteron SMP with ATI9800XP
the ubercooled phase change systems
or silent $500 zalman case..

If you go in any extreme, the costs go way up. and some times you get 2 of the three qualities, but if you really push, you only get the one .

Cool and fast are closely aligned, but sometimes it seems people's goals are to have the coolest die temp, instead of the fastest machine...

Although cool CPU might override the others for something like a laptop..

But basically the Zalman case is not for people who hang here, they're about speed and cooling systems, damn the noise.
"70dB screaming Delta fans.. bring em on if I can get 1C cooler die temp" seems a common sentiment.

How many articles have been posted here about various waterblocks in development, and with no hard numbers or anything until the thing is ready for final testing. How many months have some of those projects taken to reach readiness?

For me, noise is every bit as valid a spec as flow rate or die temp, I come to watercooling looking for a noise solution primarily. If I had to run my CPU at 60C and non-overclocked and could have a nearly silent system, I'd go for it. So, if the Zalman case is more of a concept case, that's fine. Lets see what they are doing and see if there is a way to do it better. I'd rather see how they did it, rather than just a number, of course having both is better, but it beats having no information.

"70dB screaming Delta fans.. bring em on if I can get 1C cooler die temp" seems a common sentiment.

I doubt that anyone in this forum uses the EHEs for anything other than heatsink testing. Maybe on hardforums or xtremesystems? I was wondering the other day after a week of listening to a 92mm Tornado if anyone actually ran them all the time. I can't imagine that personally.

"If I had to run my CPU at 60C and non-overclocked and could have a nearly silent system, I'd go for it. "

You can get die temperatures well below 60C with overclocked tbreds and bartons using water, an Eheim 1048, a big heatercore, and 2 120mm L1As at 6V. That's "nearly silent" and not decreasing the life of your system either.

And I am glad that you brought up laptops. If in the Zalman case you are restricted in video card and CPU choice by what won't get so hot it melts, then why not just buy a laptop? I have never had any complaints about the noise levels of my thinkpad, and the new t40s have fast CPUs, mobility 9600s and all the trimmings. When you add a $1000CAD case to the cost of a desktop then I suspect higher end notebooks start to become competitive. For that matter the new Apple G5s are pretty quiet and not that much more expensive than PCs...

I had my laptop hooked up to a 19" monitor, standard keyboard, standard mouse, and stuck it on a shelf in my desk. Worked awsome for quiet computer! If I didn't actually use my laptop at work and for my CNC mill it would have stayed that way. :) Good point.

Yea my Thinkpad is my primary work PC: I use dual display to have its 14" screen and a 19" Sony monitor in multimon action. I don't bother with an extra keyboard but I use a MX700 mouse. It's nice to work in silence. With the newer notebooks you can even get by pretty well at LANs and things are only going to continue to improve. Notebooks suck for serious i/o work; wouldn't want to do video editing on one. But they make fine quiet PCs.

Regarding the oven-effect: don't forget the holes in the bottom and on the top. It will probably still get _hot_ (like a monitor?), but you won't be able to bake your bread in the case. =)

Well then ...
 

Of course you can , just use your imagination ... :D

my 2cents

http://voodoopc.com/systems/f50.aspx

if your so incline, i would give these guys a call and see if you can review their unit yourselves. the only thing offered for the case is with the amd64 3200+, with a slew of other goodies. i had to post this, since i read alot of bashing going on and alot of "elitest" attitude as well. a good review of this should atleast temper some attitude and clear some people's doubts.

might be nice to know about it, but there is virtually NOTHING on the site
all this for a mere $3500

pathetic marketing

Well.. If I were to make and sell a system like that, I'd probably charge close to US$3500 for it too..

Think how much time and machining $$ you'd have have to spend to make a small run PC case with heatpipe coolers.

Of course the first 10 might be $3500, the next 100.. $1000, after that the volumes would start getting reasonable enough to get the case price under $500. But not with a Mobo and chip and vidcard.

He isn't knocking the price, he is knocking the advertising for something so expensive. At least that's how I took it. If I were looking at a system for $3,500 they better be able to tell me how well it works out with empirical scientific data to back them selfs up. Not to mention the damn case better be able to produce gold out of air. :D Silence isn't worth that much.

True, the site is very lite on real hard info about what makes the damn thing worth $3500, bus then again, take a look at BoXX's site..
http://www.boxxtech.com/asp/cf_step2...InstanceID=292
That's a $3000 gaming box.. and you can bet it's not anywhere near silent. It's not even watercooled!

I folllow the Mac world as well as the x86 world, there's a lot of people who are just as fanatical about silence as watercooling.
Do a google search on 'silent pc'
then on watercooler pC or watercooled.
There's interest.

I've set up my work office as quiet as possible, got low speed fans in my PC and I use several 80mm fans to keep the air moving with 7V operation. Replaced the noisy 40mm CPU fan with a bigger 60mm fan. And then put the machine under my desk, with the back exhausts facing the corner of the cube walls that are fabric over foam. It makes a difference.

I've got a fanless Athlon system, its not exactly cold, or overclocked, but its fairly simple. I'm not sure why Zalman don't simply include a small waterpump and massive rads on the side panels.

Components in my case are : CPU block, GPU block, GFX RAM block, NB block, 2xHDD blocks, SB block, PSU block

System is a 1600XP at stock speed and volts, and a GF4 Ti4200, also at stock.

Eheim 1048, 2 large heatercores attached to the sides of a 4U server case.

Works fine, I had to use very thick hose, because the water was getting up to about 40 degrees, causing the hoses to flex. CPU runs at 58-60 degrees under load. I made all my waterblocks myself, all to a very open design, to make sure that flowrate was kept fairly high through the large number of blocks.

Its perfectly stable, I use it as my server, main PC now is a Toshiba laptop.

I don't know why someone hasn't just done this large rads on the side of the case thing with water, rather than heatpipes, which seem quite fiddly. A decent water pump won't make any noise at all, if sufficiently isolated using foam padding or rubber feet.

And for some reason the nordic hardware site is down? I've seen the case before, but I'd like to read the preview, if only to get more information on the placement of the heatpipes.

Not a very conclusive article, but thought it might be a link for those interested: http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20040115/index.html

He reached the same conclusion: Too expensive for an almoust silent case, and no room for overclock.