Zalman TNN 300 fanless case

Value

The Zalman TNN 300 is available from QuietPC UK for £450.00 (£528.75 inc VAT) or US$798.95 from QuietPC USA. How do you go about deciding whether a £500 / $800 case represents good value or not? Can a Ferrari ever be 'good value' when a humble KIA will also get you from A to B? Let's face it: if you're not bothered about aesthetics or acoustics, there are many cheaper options. Any standard PC case would do, but just as some people wouldn't be caught dead in anything as 'economical' as a KIA, others will pay top dollar for quality design and performance.



The Hoojum Cubit 5 in sexy Chrome (left) is £242 and doesn't even come with a PSU. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to spend £500 on a case, actually. The only other HTPC case we found in this price bracket is the SilverStone LC18B for an eye-watering £501.73. But then, it does come with a 7-inch touchscreen TFT built into the front of it, which inflates the price somewhat.

The only other way to evaluate the TNN 300 for value is to spec up a full system and compare it to off-the-shelf HTPC packages. As tested, our system added another £500 on top of the case-only price, giving us a total budget of approximately £1000. For that kind of money, your other options are something like the beblu Media Center system we tested last month. In this company, the Zalman case suddenly doesn't look so expensive: Athlon 64 3200+ vs VIA Nehemiah 1.3GHz processor; NVIDIA 6600 vs S3 on-board graphics etc

Conclusions

We've given Zalman's TNN 300 a good once over, and this is a wonderful case - it's a pleasure to use, a pleasure to look at and it's quiet. Very quiet. It isn't without flaws however.

First, this is clearly very expensive for a case. You could spend £150 on a very nice case, £60 on a good quality 350W power supply, £50 on a good heatsink for your processor, £30 for a quiet graphics cooling solution, and another £50 for extras to ease your new system into your living room (adding a remote to it etc.). Even with all these excesses, you'd still have £200 in your pocket that you wouldn't if you bought a TNN 300.

The case is also very demanding. We've already mentioned Zalman's hardware compatibility list, which lists what components you can and cannot use with the TNN 300. The no-no list includes all processors which consume 75W or more (anything more power hungry than an Athlon 3500+, making most Pentium 4 CPU's incompatible), all graphics cards better than a GeForce 6600 (including all of the 7xxx series) and most µATX motherboards with non-standard layouts.

Remembering that this case is aimed at the HTPC / Media Center market, these limitations still allow you to build a system with plenty of grunt with virtually no noise. It may not be a top-end gaming system, but it can be far more useful than the low-end CPU with integrated graphics-type system that dominates the silent HTPC market.

Zalman's TNN 300 is far from perfect, but it is very desirable: if you've the money to burn then you won't be disappointed. If you're after a quiet life but you're not in the market for a HTPC chassis then you should also consider the larger (and more expensive) TNN 500AF from Zalman.