Zalman HD160XT Plus HTPC Chassis review

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Zalman HTPC HD160XT PLUS review

Here we see that fan; it's positioned in front of the power supply. There's a second fan next to the right drive cage and two additional fans in the rear. Despite the number of fans the chassis remains silent. in fact with all components installed we measured a 32 DBa noise level; which is pretty much noiseless.

Zalman HTPC HD160XT PLUS review

I really like the attention to detail, if you have a closer look at the drive cage you will perceive rubber mounts in there to prevent your HDs from resonating and thus making noise.

Zalman HTPC HD160XT PLUS review

A single screw secures each cage in the chassis; easy to remove and install. The ODD cage will hold an additional HDD, but the bottom slot is partially occupied by the card reader, so that would be a tight fit. The cages both can be removed easily from the chassis.

When we remove the drive cage we see that second 92mm exhaust fan and cabling for the LCD screen.

Zalman HTPC HD160XT PLUS review

Alright, let's build us a High-Def HTPC my dear Guru3D citizens. Since this is a HTPC that I'll actually be using I have decided to not use old components, yet build a reasonably priced HTPC that'll last a while. I need this PC to decode HD movies, yet require it to be silent.

  • Jetway mainboard with Intel chipset
  • Core 2 Quad Q6600
  • 2 GB Corsair PC2 DDR 800
  • Fanless power supply
  • Silent cooler
  • Audigy 4 soundcard
  • 500 GB HD
  • GeForce 7950 iChill edition from Inno3D (no active cooling).

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