Silverstone

Silverstone at Cebit stands for high end home theatre PC chassis and innovative tower systems, this year was not different.

One of their partners in Germany had a system on display which used a Silverstone case to passively cool the whole system.



Don’t expect low temperatures, but pure silence instead!



Pretty much the same stuff, but then smaller, the Silverstone SG02W. Notice how Silverstone is using big external heatsinks to keep temperatures beneath critical levels.



Rounded etches, clean finish and good looks, the compact size and the top handle makes it easy to transport this housing. Silverstone's SG04:



Silverstone also had a pre-production model at the show. This new housing comes with few advanced options and it also looks very clean and stylish.



The case has two large intake fans, one in the front and one in top. Each intake fan comes with its own dust filter. The front filter can be easily taken out of the housing for cleaning purposes; unfortunately this option is not available with the other intake fans. We discussed this fact with a technical assistant, we might see this feature with future Silverstone cases he explained us, for now only the front fan (which collects most dust) well get the easy exchangeable filter. To top fan is indeed an intake fan. Most people wonder why it isn't an outtake, well, experiments in Silverstone's R&D department proved that the difference between intake & outtake is negligible, so why not?



The hard disk drives are installed inside black drive holders: you slide the disk holder back in place and the hard disk will then automatically connect to a SATA interface. SATA cables are also provided; cable routing is once again being improved. This case comes also with pre-applied tubing holes for those who use external heat exchangers for their water-cooling setups. The PSU is installed in such a way that it is not using any air from inside the housing to cool itself; this will make the components inside the PSU run cooler which returns extended life for the individual components.



The rear reveals the water cooling provisions, as well as a small switch, which is hooked up to the motherboard’s BIOS reset, to allow you quick access to a total system BIOS reset without having to open your case!



For the enthusiasts, Silverstone showed their newest addition to the Zeus power supply series. Going by the model number ZU1200M, this PSU is able to feed up to 1200 Watts. It comes with only one single 12V rail, rated at 95 Ampére this rail can hold up to 1180 Watts electrical power. But that's not it yet, this power supply comes with two different circuit board each containing the single or multiple rail technology. One PCB where a single 12V is being made, the other holds place for six 12V rails each rated for up 17 Ampére, the user has the possibility to choose between both PSU technology's!



One of the new Silverstone housings comes with front fan that can be very easily removed as the fan is no longer using wires to connect to the system but instead uses the interface pictured below. You don't have to worry about detaching the fan connector whenever you want to take out the fan, the interface is gold plated in order to prevent bad contact caused by oxidation.



One of the other products at Silverstone's booth, the Commander fan controller. You may question: "where on earth did they put the potentiometer?", but the fact is that there are none. The Commander series are ESA certificated and allow fan control via Windows software. The fan controller can feed up to a half Ampére at 12V, some performance 12V fans may cause the controller to fail, but overall most fans will be compatible with this product.



The Commander can take up to 5 fans and comes with 4 temperature probes:



CoolIT

Arriving at the CoolIT booth, we enter the world of high-end TEC water-cooling . First we were shown a complete setup where the CPU was being cooled by the very high end CoolIT Boreas MTEC CPU cooling kit. This system uses Thermo Electric Coolers to chill down the water; the TEC's are air-cooled in turn. Via software, this system comes with performance/noise regulation; you can set fluid temperature as low as 15°C! The Quad Core Q9650 ran at 4,6GHz using this method of cooling, insane! Pre-build inside a Silverstone TJ07 this is no cheap solution though, between $850-950



The SLI video cards also come with peltier cooling, here the TEC's are being mounted directly on top of the GPU's.



And off course, CrossFire is also supported, but no TECs here:



A picture of the controlling software:



The most interesting product for most people might be the cheapest too, the CoolIT PURE designed to remove up to 150W of heat, and aimed to be quieter than Intel Stock cooling, it has a suggested retail price of ~$135.