Zalman has always soldered all heatsink components together, it is their distinguishing feature. In the base the heatpipes lie in special grooves and are also soldered to them:

The whole thing is cooled with a 92mm fan installed in a plastic frame on one of the sides of the heatsink:

Zalman CNPS9300 AT uses a fan with Superflo bearing and 50,000 hours MTBF:

The fan supports PWM rotation speed control feature. Its rotation speed can be adjusted from ~1500RPM to ~2400RPM at 20-30dBA noise. Too bad that even at the slowest rotation speed the fan motor generates very annoying crackling sound that makes the noise from the system case sound very uncomfortable. T maximum rotation speed the sound of airflow created by this fan joins the crackle.

While the fan on Zalman CNPS9300 AT is definitely not the best it could be, the base quality is impeccable: it is perfectly even and polished:

The mirror-quality of the base provides a very good thermal compound imprint (it got slightly smeared when we removed the cooler from the CPU):