Installation & Performance

I wanted to really try and overheat the Z-Alien, just to see what the breaking point would be right out of the box. I ran around my office, gathering up every piece of gear that I could find to mount in the Z-Alien. My Vantec Stealth 470W power supply was up to the task, as I wanted to at least plug everything in. I installed an Intel D875PBZ motherboard with a 3 gig 800Mhz Pentium 4. I also tossed in a trio of 7500rpm hard drives, an Asus Ti4200 8x AGP video card, and an Audigy 2 Platinum sound card. High performance cooling solutions have been installed on the P4 (Swiftech MCX 478-V) and the Ti4200 (Vantec Iceberq4 Pro), so the challenge will be for the case to shift that air! 

During the installation I found out what the single blue anodized expansion slot cover was for…the top expansion bay has a lip along the upper edge that will not allow the snap-in bay covers to fit that slot. The power supply would not fit unless the support bar was removed first, but this is easily done by removing three screws. I found the wire for the 120mm exhaust fan to be pretty short. I unbolted the fan and rotated it to allow a little more slack. Finally I got to the tool less expansion card brackets, and they work great! Lining up the card takes a little getting used to, but they lock the cards just as securely as screws.  The feet mount up on clips, and are then secured with one screw.

The rail system is hands-down the best feature in this case. Just grab two clips out of the storage container, snap them onto whatever drive you want to mount, and slide it in. I attempted to mount a Coolermaster Musketeer with the rails, but that wouldn’t work. Turns out there are still screw mounts that will allow you to mount a device even if the rails will not fit. Only problem was the screw mounts are only in one spot…so in the case of the Musketeer, it stuck out too far for the door to close properly.

The next task was to mount the hard drives, which went like a charm with the rail system. The problem was that the cables almost come out too far if you are using standard molex, SATA, or rounded IDE cables. 90° molex connectors and standard IDE cables seem to be the best way to go, or else it’ll be a tight fit.

Everything was finally installed and I powered the Z-Alien up. I went to close the door, and the whole thing shut down. Opened the door, and the computer started again. What the heck!?

I found that the door is a little too close to the power switches. They do not have to be depressed completely to kill the power, and only closing the door VERY gently could this be avoided. Using some good old Yankee engineering, I grabbed a piece of felt tape from some Velcro I had handy, and slapped it on the door, just inside of where the door would make contact with the switch. That worked perfectly, I could now close the door without shutting the system down! The next picture shows inside the door, and shows how this happened. The flat back of the door is easily visible, and the protruding power switches are on the lower right hand side of the image. You can also see the limited space for bay items with protrusions, such as the front port for an Audigy 2 Platinum.

**click to enlarge**

I thought some of the blue lights that were on the equipment I was installing would look out of place…boy, was I wrong!

For temperature testing, I ran the Z-Alien 30 minutes with no activity to get the idle temps using Motherboard Monitor 5. After that, I fired up BurnInTest 4 Professional to work the computer at full blast for 30 minutes, and then took another reading from Motherboard Monitor.

I was impressed. 60° is generally considered the beginning of the danger area for the processor, which is on Sensor 2. Clearly our test here has shown that you’ll have to really over clock your chip to get close, and P4s are “hot running” chips to start out with. It should also be mentioned that when I shut down Burnintest Pro, the chip

temps were back down to 34°C in two minutes.

Next: Conclusion