Assembling The TNN 500A And Putting It To The Test
The TNN 500A ships nearly mostly pre-assembled, which means that the chassis is pre-assembled. It is up to the consumer to install the heat pipes for the CPU, GPU and HDD coolers. While this was not a surprise to us, since we always have to install a heatsink on the CPU, anyway, the need for user installation of heat pipes for hard drive installation and the GPU cooler will demand extra time. Still, this is not much beyond what is normally involved in assembling a new computer.
A look at the side panel of the TNN 500A. By looking at the fins that you can see clearly on the side panel, it is obvious that the TNN 500A is really one big heat sink.
It should, however, be pointed out that the removal of the heatsink fan from the video card could potentially void its warranty. Most video card manufacturers are not going to honor warranty coverage claims for their video cards when the warranty claim is due to cooling solutions not tested by the manufacturers.While we encountered no problems with the Zalman cooling solution once it was installed on our Radeon 9800 Pro test card, we cannot say with certainty that ATI would be willing to replace a video card under ATI's warranty should we encounter a failure due to this installation.
