Upon opening the box I noticed two things. First Global Win included the rails
to mount a hard drive separate from the fan housing on the ISTORM. Second I
thought to myself that this was not going to look as good as a flush mount
design. The ISTORM's plastic cover comes off very easy to expose the squirrel
cage looking fan. Originally I thought it came off a little to easy but once I
installed it, I realized that it makes it easy to clean the filter screen even
with the fan running. There's not much to the ISTORM, just the fan with its
mounting support and the plastic cover. I installed the mofo and waited for my
9° C drop in temp. Yes in the
lower right hand corner of the picture is an empty Red Stripe beer bottle still
there from the last review. The joys of being a single male.
As I watched the
the temperature rise to just 1° C below what it was before, I started reading
the smaller print on the side of the box. Now we get to the truth. If you look
at the temps from the Global Win test system then you can see that they meant 9°
C difference in hard drive temperature and a 2° C difference in case
temperature.
Is this false
advertising or just a simple marketing mistake? My judgment call is that it was
more of a translation problem. I've lived in Asia before and the wording on the
box reminds me of someone trying hard to translate word for word but missing the
exact meaning when done. The fan was very quite while putting out the air flow
of an 80mm case fan (tested with the Stampie Calibrated Hand®)
and the hard drive I installed in it did not feel any hotter than room
temperature.
You guys are
probably sitting there saying "WTF man, just tell us, is it ghey or what?" The
good points of the ISTORM are the quite fan (barely a hum when I put my ear next
to it), easy to clean filter screen and it is a good hard drive cooler. The bad
points are the price ($40 suggested retail) and the way it sits about 2 inches
out of the case. At 40 bones I'd have to call it ghey but for the $32 it can be
found on the net I'd say it is a switch hitter. I would recommend it as a hard
drive cooler if it was priced around $25 but don't let the box fool you, it is
just a good hard drive cooler with little benefit to case or CPU temps. Sorry
to the beer drinkers out there, I'm still have a hangover from last night so no
beer was consumed during the making of this review.
Pros:
Cons:
-
Some may not
like it hanging 2” out of the case
-
Limited as a
system cooler.
-
Suggested
retail price a little high in our estimation
Rating: 7/10
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