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Both of the side panels can be easily removed as Zoostorm has secured them with thumbscrews. These feature plastic grips which are a lot easier to grip securely than bare metal.
Zoostorm has chosen to use the budget oriented Asus F1A55-M LE Motherboard.
In the centre of the motherboard we can see an AMD reference cooler sitting on top of the triple core AMD A6-3500 APU. Zoostorm are using the integrated AMD Radeon 6530 graphics chip so there is no discrete graphics card installed in the system. All of the expansion slots are unpopulated so you can add a graphics card such as the low cost Radeon HD 6670 to boost the graphics performance.
The power supply is a Zoostorm branded unit and is located above the motherboard. This is clearly a ‘cost effective' OEM unit, though, so caution is recommended when adding additional components to the system.
Sadly, during testing we noticed that this power supply generates a lot of noise It is actually one of the loudest power supplies we have heard to date.
Zoostorm has installed 8 GB (2x 4 GB) of DDR3 1333 MHz memory in the system which fills both RAM slots on the motherboard. The ‘Goldkey' brand are a value offering.
There is a single Western Digital 750 GB hard drive installed in the system and there is a room for a further drive should you wish to install one at a future date.
We are happy to see that Zoostorm has devoted some time and effort into ensuring that the cables are all well routed. This isn't likely to affect airflow, though, as this would require fans to be installed in the chassis to begin with!
Quite a let down, not on a performance level, but why use a loud PSU in such an ideal media center system?
wow what a terrible system, why such a high score if the PSU is ultra loud? its ideal for a media center until this is factored in.
its not the psu its the heatsink and fan that runs at 4000rpm to fix that all you have to do is replace the cooler with a silent low profile cooler as some coolers can be very large just dont reuse the thermal compound and be sure to clean all the old off
Hi blaze dragon, it’s definitely the PSU in my review unit that makes the noise as I turned the CPU fan off for a moment and the noise was still present.
I bought one of this zoostorm pc from http://www.rossdigital.co.uk and i found it really good performance. I think they are better than HP and cheaper.
CPU’s don’t make any sound as it is attached to the motherboard what you all be hearing is the fan on the CPU but all these very rarely make a noise. What you will be hearing is the noise from the fan from the PSU (POWER SUPPLY UNIT) So if you want and clever enough you can change the fan on the PSU or get a new PSU FROM any computer shop. Good luck all
I bought a Zoostorm from Argos . I sent it back the next day ,I could not put up with the noise it was like having a leaf blowing machine in the room. worst pc on the market