Installation and Operation (continued):
The next bonus of the Zalman HD135 is the included Media Center remote control.
The remote is well laid out, sturdy remote capable of doing just about anything you could imagine from the couch while you are either in Media Center or Zalman's included Media Bay software.
The next image simply shows a screen capture of the Media Bay software.
Now for the good news... I was able to use just the two included fans to cool this entire system. At idle I am seeing ~38C CPU temperatures. Loaded to 100%, temperatures do climb to around 46C, but remember I am passively cooling the 3500+ processor with NO fan installed on the Thermalright XP120! If I was to put my normal 120mm fan on the XP120 temperatures would be extremely low, but I would have to listen to my home theater whine. Not only that, but I have the two fans set manually to 50% of their speed. I will further tweak the VFD /controller to automatically speed up the fans as temperatures rise. This is exactly what I was after, a system that made almost no noise yet stayed at a controlled temperature. The picture on the left shows what the system would have looked like water cooled, and the one on the right shows the final arrangement passively air cooled.
