The Cooling
The heatsink assembly is a pair of large copper coolers, made of stacked copper plates around a triplet of heatpipes, connected to an aluminum base plate with a copper plate to interface with the CPU. The coolers are joined together using two of the screw and spring combinations used to mount the assembly to the CPUs via the mainboard. The heatsink closest to the rear of the chassis has its heatpipes joining the base from the side, with the heatsink nearest the front of the chassis having its trio of heatpipes join up with the base at the rear of the plate.To remove the assembly, you unscrew six retaining screws, spring loaded; two for the front heatsink plate, two shared in the middle of the plates and one each for the larger heatsinks themselves. Then the assembly just lifts out.
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You can see the heatpipes clearly interfacing with their copper baseplates, topped with an aluminium plate that's bonded to the copper base. In the following photograph you can see the contact areas with the heatsink bases, left by the thermal compound.
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Finally, a shot of the cooler lying on its back.
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It's slightly fiddly to replace them, moreso than actually removing them, but a steady hand sees you there in the end. It's then a case of just screwing them back down.
The coolers and the fan assembly are rated to handle any Opteron or Athlon FX CPU up to 89W TDP. That means any current shipping Opteron or Athlon FX, up to FX-53 and Opteron 250, is supported.
The PSU and its cooling
The power supply on the ZMAXdp we had spy shots of, was an FSP 250W unit. It's hard to tell if the same PSU is being used in our preview unit, since the PSU is very difficult to remove, once in place, due to a run of cabling you attach after doing so, that seriously hampers your efforts to get the PSU out. I'm going to hazard a guess and say it's a newer 300W (or more) unit, but I can't be 100% certain, and I don't want to damage the unit in any way.
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The PSU fans are also the cooling fans for the heatsinks, the large copper heatsink 'heads' sitting directly in front of those fans in the photograph. The air is exhausted from the chassis, pulled from the CPU heatsinks and passed over the PSU itself. There's no active cooling for the hard disks in the ZMAXdp, the unit just relying on any residual airflow generated by those PSU fans, pulled from the front of the case.
The fans themselves are temperature controlled, only spinning in full-speed mode when CPU temperature reaches a certain level. Each fan is also individually controllable in terms of that threshold, as you'll see in the BIOS soon, helping you in keeping a nice noise balance, if you have one CPU that runs hotter than the other.
