Design and Functionality

Zalman VF2000 LED is a cooler of very modest size. It measures 126 x 110 x 45 mm. The latter number allows us to consider it a low-profile processor cooler, although when Zalman designed their VF2000 LED they were pursuing a completely different goal: to make sure that the cooler would fit perfectly onto a graphics accelerator, too.

In terms of design, Zalman VF2000 LED looks more like a graphics card cooler, rather than a CPU cooler. It includes an aluminum heatsink made of 58 plates that sit on four copper heatpipes 6 mm in diameter. The heatpipes come out of the cooper base plate. All heatsink parts of this cooling solution are nickel-plated.

New cooler weighs only 290 g. According to the official specifications, its heatsink plates are 0.3 mm thick. The gap between the plates measures about 1.3-1.4 mm. Zalman engineers implemented new VFP (Variable Fin Profile) technology in their heatsink. It implies that the heatsink plates are all of variable height, which according to Zalman provides “optimized cooling efficiency and maximized dissipation area”. Another part of VFP technology is a 92x15 mm fan sitting inside a hollow in the center of the heatsink.

The fan rotation speed can be adjusted in the interval from 1400 to 2350 RPM using the provided FanMate 2 rotation speed controller. The fan will generated from 19 to 29 dBA of noise. It is built with two ball bearings, which MTBF is not specified among the cooler technical details. I tried to remove the fan from the heatsink in order to examine it and determine its actual manufacturer, but I failed.

The heatpipes are soldered to the cooler base. The finish quality of the base plate is impeccably perfect:

The evenness of the base is also superb: it produces ideal thermal compound imprints on a glass surface, CPU heat-spreader as well as on the GPU die:

I believe that’s about all I can say on the design of the new Zalman VF2000 LED cooler. Now let’s move on to the installation procedure. It should be just as interesting, because as we have already said, we can install the new cooler onto the CPU as well as graphics card.