Date: February 12th, 2007
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: NZXT
<--SHOP FOR A NZXT ZERO COMPUTER CASE HERE
PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
Hard drive installation is quite easy as well, with the same cable caveats.
All done and ready to put the side panel on. I'll need to make sure to connect the side fans before installing the panel. Kind of a mess, but perfectly serviceable. The manual is a bit on the skimpy side when it comes to details, but the experienced enthusiast should have no trouble figuring out where everything goes.
The blue, lighted chevrons serve as power lights and give the case front some visual interest and the window at the top will show off any lighted bay devices. The Zero has a look that I find appealing. OK, it looks nice, but what about cooling?
For this review, I used the following components.
AMD Opteron 148 CPU (overclocked to 2.7 GHz, +0.1 Vcore) with AMD heatpipe cooler.
DFI Lanparty UT nF4 SLI-DR motherboard
eVGA 7900 GS KO graphics card with stock cooler
OCZ 5002048ELGE-K (1024mb X 2) memory
Xclio Stablepower 850W PSU
Western Digital WD800 SATA hard drive
Lite-On DVD-RW drive
A baseline was established using my open test frame, and results using the installed components at 20C room temperature are as follows.
After booting to desktop, the system was allowed to idle for one hour and the highest temperatures were recorded for the CPU, chipset and PWM sensors on the motherboard. Temps from the GPU sensor was also recorded. The system was then loaded with Prime95 and 3Dmark05 for one hour and the highest temperatures recorded.
These same components in the Zero, using the same methodology, yielded the following results:
Very impressive indeed! The Zero posted up some of the best numbers I've seen and come close to temps I see in my open test frame. The Zero is also pretty quiet. Not silent, but considering the fact that there are eight fans running inside this case, the noise level is quite acceptable.
