X-bit labs

Battle of the Titans: Super Coolers from Scythe, Thermaltake and Zalman Face to Face (page 4)

Category: Coolers

by Doors4ever

[ 10/21/2005 | 11:44 AM ]

Zalman CNPS9500 LED

It was the CNPS9500 LED model from Zalman broke a lull in the cooler wars. Its original design should be already known to you. If not, refer to our “First Look at Zalman CNPS9500 LED: the Power of Air, the Efficiency of Water” review for details. However, I didn’t have an intention to single this cooler out by testing it first. This order came naturally since this cooler’s fastening was already installed on the mainboard.

A side note about the fastening: although the fastening of this cooler is not ideal (there are no perfect things in this imperfect world, so we may see a simpler, easier and handier way of mounting a cooler in the future), the Zalman CNPS9500 LED has no competitors in this respect among the coolers I’m going to test in this review. The mainboard’s standard fastening frame is used with Socket 754, 939, 940 or 478. The cooler design permits you to turn it on the socket as you think necessary. A back-plate and a frame enclosed with the cooler are used to mount it on Socket LGA775.

Important : the frame is screwed up to the front and not the back side of the mainboard. You should put the back-plate on a flat surface, line it up with the mounting holes around the mainboard’s CPU socket, put the frame on top and screw it up. The whole operation takes as little as a minute of your time. We’ll have an opportunity to compare this fastening with that of other coolers later on.

Since I have begun to talk about how coolers are installed and fastened, I want to add some words about thermal paste. Every beginner faces the problem of how much paste should be applied to the CPU. And I think this problem is more serious than it seems. For example, I admit that the photo below is not very illustrative and in reality there’s a thin layer of paste on the CPU:

But there can’t be two opinions here – there’s too much of thermal paste: