X-bit labs

First Look at Zalman CNPS9500 LED: the Power of Air, the Efficiency of Water

Category: Coolers

by Doors4ever

[ 08/19/2005 | 12:34 PM ]

We would like to introduce to you a real masterpiece of the air cooling art designed by Zalman. This new baby, which was first showcased at the Computex 2005 has now reached our lab and simply impressed us with its cooling potential. We couldn’t wait to share the results of our first look at this solution.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Installation Tips
  
• Technical Specifications
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Conclusion
  

There is a widely spread opinion that it is rally simple to design the most efficient and powerful cooling systems in the world. The “secret” behind the most powerful cooler is actually quite simple: make a few changes to the heatsink design, add more copper to it, install a faster and bigger fan on top, and here you go: the monster is ready. It will cope with the cooling of any CPU, but it will generate so much noise, that you will never be happy about using it. With the help of the same principle – “faster and bigger” – you can also design a powerful cooling system for the graphics card or a liquid-cooling system. But Zalman, doesn’t offer “record-breakers” like this. They are smarter.

Another great way of earning some money is to copy somebody else’s idea. It usually works like this: someone came up with a great idea, we will slightly modify it and start production. But not Zalman. This company never falls down to imitating somebody else’s inventions, they create their own highly technological solutions boasting unique set of features. They are fairer competitors.

There are a lot of cooling systems in the market right now: there are more efficient ones, quieter ones, fancier ones, lighter ones, smaller or bigger ones, better packaged ones, etc. However, Zalman has always been great in providing their products with a combination of features, which would seem absolutely incompatible at first glance. And this is how a real product is born, Product with the capital letter. That is why it wouldn’t be correct to say that Zalman designs the most powerful cooling solutions. They design THE BEST ones.

After a number of failed attempts, the cooler makers have learned to design efficient solutions based on heatpipe technology. There is the whole lot of more or less similar models in the market today, which ensure efficient cooling performance and at the same time offer quite acceptable level of noise. Almost every single week another Zalman 7700 killer is officially announced. To tell the truth, I don’t think it is fair to compare the newcomers against the previous generation coolers. Zalman 7000 cooler family used to be among the world’s best cooling solutions back in the days: universal design, efficient performance, quite operation – a true dream. Zalman 7700 solution is the result of extensive family development, a response to new processors on hot Prescott core. It got heavier, but other than that it remained the same. The launch of this cooler was as important for the industry as the release of a new software patch or game add-on, even a little bit more important than that.

Today we would like to introduce to you a new generation of Zalman coolers. I am very proud that you will first learn about a new heat-pipe based Zalman CNPS9500 LED cooler from X-bit labs.