The review team over at 01net have spotted something wrong with their ZOTAC ZBOX CI540. The fan-less design compact desktop was running its dual core i5-4210Y CPU at 80 celcius in an idle state, which is obviously ridiculously hot for a CPU running at idle.
While investigating the cause, the review team opened up the Zotac ZBOX to find that the protective plastic film on the CPU thermal pad had been left in place, preventing the CPU cooler from making contact with the CPU and causing the system to over heat. This is a real rookie mistake and we imagine someone will be getting frowned at pretty hard by their line manager in the Zotac factory.
Of course the temperatures dropped back to normal with the plastic removed, but don’t be so quick to open your ZBOX and check this yourself, because doing so will void your warranty, doh! Hopefully this is a one-off problem, but it is certainly something to keep in mind if you’re experiencing similar issues.
Thank you TechPowerUp for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of TechPowerUp.
How on earth could this have been overlooked,surely it must have been checked before going on the shelves.!
Needless to say, I’ll not be buying one of those.
ZOTAC has found the plastic film to be isolated to preproduction units. These preproduction units were only used for press sampling and are not representative of final units shipping to retail. However, the plastic film has very little impact on the cooling capabilities of our passive ZBOX C-series nano chassis since the cooling fins that are responsible for the majority of the heat dissipation duties is below the thermal pad. The thermal pad is only used to transfer heat to the secondary heat dissipation plate integrated into the chassis for added cooling capabilities.
Nevertheless, the temperatures observed while testing under load with the erroneous plastic film still in place is still within the thermal guidelines of Intel’s 100°C maximum T junction and does not cause instability. Temperatures observed by users can vary greatly depending on room temperature and system placement since the ZBOX CI540 nano is passive cooled. We apologize for the error but assure our mass production units are not affected.