Zalman ZM-NC3500 PLUS Notebook Cooler Unboxing & Test Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,785 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to an unboxing and First Look in
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standard definition wow it's like going back in
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time so we're going to be having a look at the Zalman ZM NC 3500 plus now the
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baby is sleeping so I do have to be quiet! I apologize for that but there's
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not a whole lot I can do about it right now so this is a premium notebook cooler
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with built-in two channel USB sound card and dual amplifiers it also has their
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enhanced okay so that's pretty much stereo sound built stereo speakers a 4X
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usb2 Hub and a 220 mm or 22 cm cooling
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fan it supports notebooks up to 17 in now if you guys have a gaming okay you
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know what let's finish with the Box first so enhanced stereo sound we got
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that okay typical notebook we got that too maximum cooling performance and
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ergonomic design cool this looks like most of the same stuff Dynamic airflow
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design I don't think we've covered that o sound control
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buttons on off mute volume down volume
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up okay and so yeah if you guys have a gaming
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notebook or you know anyone who has a gaming notebook what you probably know about them is that they run really hot
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they tend to have big cooling fan well that's a small cooling fan but there's a
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big cooling fan somewhere I think it's down here and there's the intakes
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there's the exhausts big heat sinks and
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especially if you run them on a carpet or on a bed or even on a table a lot of
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the time they can run really really hot so what we're going to be doing is we're
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going to be firing up a game on this MSI GX 660r we're going to fire it up on the
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table and then we are going to use the
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ZM NC 3500 plus to see if that improves
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the temperatures of the CPU and the GPU
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on this notebook so let's first get the unboxing out of the way so the sound of
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Styrofoam very rarely wakes up babies
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right all right that wasn't oh that was
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worse okay that's great more
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styrofoam and of course my notebook can
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shut down correctly okay there we go
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that's cool let's get the cooler
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out all right so notebook cooler there's your 22 cm fan right there so it's
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pretty big right this looks giving me the nod
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it's pretty big okay so you got rubber grippies here here here here and here
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now there's a reason that it's shaped like this number one is you got speakers
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on either side there's your volume control right here onof mute down and up
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other side not a whole lot at the back
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you've got uh oh fan speed I was like
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volume really again uh but it's not so PC there's your USB hub so that's sort
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of feeding that and there's the power in which will give you powered USB and as
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well as powering the uh ban potentially I guess I don't know
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ah yes the angle so the angle is important on these things because that's
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what actually makes it more ergonomic to use for
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example slightly tilted down is more
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comfortable to typon when you're sitting in front of it you can always adjust the
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screen because it's a notebook and the screens usually fold on notebooks just
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like this
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okay so here is the laptop running on the table we're just taking an idle
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reading right now so the CPU is anywhere from 48 to 51 Dees GPU is running at 47°
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so we've got a log running on the real temp uh monitor for the quad course CPU
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that's in this notebook and we're just going to go ahead and launch a game to
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see what kind of temperatures we can generate in a real world sort of gaming
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laptop type of load so as you can see I don't have a lot of games installed on
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this particular particular computer out of all of these I think trying to is
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probably the most demanding which is sort of pathetic but there you go steam
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to oh come on are you kidding okay well we'll be
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back so we've been running for a little while here that'll give us some idea of
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what kind of temps we're dealing with so we're just going to alt Tab out really quick CPU is at around
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60° and let's check out the GPU so GPU
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peaked around 60 68° which actually
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isn't that bad so let's go ahead and and
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put on the notebook cooler um let's do it without the fan
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first and let's see if running a
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game we can actually get those temperatures to change it all so just
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for for our own reference that was uh
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like a don't worry that's from yesterday it's
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not old a
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pen this is actually a sweet pen because it has a light built into the other end
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of it fire pen
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okay so got one of my cards these are old cards you can tell because NC has
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four locations we're up to like 11 now or
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something so yeah that's that's an old card that I think one of these locations
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doesn't even exist anymore uh the Richmond well no that's the right
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Richmond one at least that's pretty good that's the only aine Mall these aren't
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older than about maybe 3 years old so yeah 60 see this is like this is
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how sort
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of this is how professional we are okay so bear in mind guys I am not running
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this with the fan on right now so we're just finding out if having it raised
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having the mesh underneath the underneath the notebook is going to help
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with the CPU and GPU temperatures versus having the notebook right up against the
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table bearing in mind the table's already a pretty decent scenario for
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your gaming notebook whereas if you're running it like um you know in bed or
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something it would be great to have a stand like this keeping the sheets from
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suffocating the F so um we'll be back in a second once we let it run for a little
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bit okay so let's find out what kind of atts we're dealing with without the fan
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running but with the not okay so we're
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looking at now that's a couple degrees cooler on the CPU that's 58 degrees on
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the hottest core and we actually
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dropped no GPU looks like it's running about the same at 68 Dees so now what
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we're going to do is we're going to fire the game back up okay get that running
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again remember we're getting load temperatures here guys that's kind of the idea um because really you don't
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need a notebook cooler if you're just going to be idling and oh are you
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kidding me see these are high-profile plugs so what that means is that if your
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USB ports are right next to each other that won't work so you're going to want
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to go ahead and uh separate those out a little bit it's doable so we're going to
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go ahead and do that I'm going to turn that fan right up to Max so uh there you
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go you can see the fan is spinning now
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although pretty quiet even at Max there's a bit of a tick there I wonder
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what that's all about so we'll go ahead
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and find out if the fan improves the
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temperatures of our notebook and uh
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yeah so this is the final test remember guys we were at about 60° on the CPU and
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about 68° on the GPU we've left it running for another 5 minutes or so um
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um and let's find out if the forced air cooling decreases the temperatures so it
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looks like the room has actually gotten a little hotter because that's the only
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explanation I can think of for why the GPU maxed out at 69 this time and the
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CPU is running again at about 58° so
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what it comes down to with this is if your laptop has adequate ventilation
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already and you're not looking at a scenario where you're using it on a
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carpet or on other sort of fabric surface sitting in bed this would be a
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perfect thing to put on your lap but if you're just using your notebook on a
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desk and you don't need the ergonomic advantage of having it tilted like this
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then there's probably less of an advantage to a notebook cooler than you
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might have actually thought now we're going to test the sound really quickly
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here as well we'll be right back okay so basically after a after a
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short test you know listening to some whoops oh eaz is that how you say that I
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don't even know but at any rate um what we concluded is that the speakers built
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into the notebook cooler are definitely louder than the ones built into this
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particular notebook however uh maybe it's due to the fact that MSI
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implemented their Dine Audio sound system with this particular notebook
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which means it does actually have uh really good speakers compared to most
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laptops U the sound quality was significantly better than the ones that
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are built into the notebook cooler part of that could be not even to do with the
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speakers that they're using or the sound chip set but just due to the way that
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the speakers are covered by this uh by this plastic cap with only open ports
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right here and right here I think that might be hampering them and and the
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performance that they're delivering in some ways so thank you for checking out
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my unboxing and first look at I see I don't remember the wrong number at the
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zmnt 3500 plus from zelman don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips for more
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