hello again!
yes Ralf the fans on the zalman are pretty close to the panaflo but it all fits in nicely! Worst bit was taking a large screwdriver to the motherboard to lever off the backing plate which was firmly attached with a double sided sticky pad!
the panaflos came from here
http://www.dorothybradbury.co.uk/
the psu fan just had a 20 second mod to remove the guard with a pair of wire cutters
rest of specs include a laptop drive, a Black Gold freeview card and a proper MCE remote
the mrs is giving it the thumbs down because of intermittent lip sink problems when watching tv and some 'stuttering' of tv when it's been on for a while. Dunno if this is a problem with the card, drivers or the hard drive but very dissappointing to be honest.
I haven't done any load tests because that's not what it's about to me - i just wanted something that was cheapish, quick to knock together and just worked! but unfortunately it doesn't which is a shame because it really is inaudible when sat on the sofa and I managed to figure out which buttons on the tv remote to press to get the digi sound coming through all 6 tv speakers, lol
bl00dy Microsoft software

might have to go back to the Panasonic dvd recorder

oh yeah it's got an Athlon 64 3000+ winchester core 90nm cpu thingy in it and half a gig of ram to complete the picture!

Also what mr qwerty**** says was not true in my case because I had to take a screwdriver to the original bracket like i said and one of the fixing screws is touching a little black diode/capacitor/whatever it is (small black rectangular thing) on the motherboard so it was very tight getting the zalman bracket to fit......