before with box cooler I was runnin 54° C - 64° C

ThermalRight !!

Thanx man!i need new cooler!but i didn't no what was the best!but now i go for the thermaltake big typhoon!

thanx!!!!!!

Easy to assimilate the facts.

Execellent rreview. In all your tests, are the motherboards placed horizontally or vertically as placed in a tower case? In all heatpipes coolers, there is fluid in the pipes which vaporises when heated. When the motherboards are placed horizontally, ie, the coolers would be in a vertically position, the fluid would flow down to the base plate which is in contact with the CPU. When the motherboard is placed in a vertical position like most boards, the lowest point of the coolers is not the base plate. Would the coolers still perform well when the fluid in the heatpipes do not flow to the base plate. Please enlighten me. Thanks.

zalman good!!

kkkkkkk

does having the zalman cooler on its side, as in a normal mid-tower case adversely effect the heat pipes ability to cool?

Thanks for the aricle, most helpfull, but it makes life more complicated nonetheless. Some tests show the Big Typhoon to beat the Zalman, but here its just the opposite. My guess is that at this level of performance other factors become decisive, mainly in-case airflow.

great review ! zalman will b the next item in my shopping basket

hey yo! i got big typhoon on asus p5wd premium. it run pretty well, but when my mobo died also and part of the cooler too. exactly rubber lever which is glued to the bottom of the mobo. i tried to pull it away but no help so far. so i had to cratch it away. thus i destroed it completly. warranty dudes alsmost gave this mobo back due to some rubber hangin out on the bottom. bad thing is that i worked with that cooler ess then a month. so now i have to buya new one though cause no propper set up without that rubber lever. sorry but my next choice would be zalman like it used to be before 7000 and 7700. may be it a bit noisy but at least it mounts simply and for good.

nice test(Super)

Hey All, just figured that I'd post a little bit about my experience with the Zalman CNPS9500 LED featured in this article.

I have this CPU cooler on a Pentium D 830 @ 3.0ghz, upon a ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe mobo. I ended up buying the cooler last week as the stock cooler was really loud, at least for my tastes. At load, the stock cooler was spinning at about 4500 RPM, keeping the proc at a temperature of ~52C.

I thought I'd give a few numbers after my experience with this cooler. Personally, I want to note that the 2400-2500 RPM that I get max with my unit isn't horribly loud, and the ~1400RPM is super-quiet, enough that with the case-fan on low, I hear my GF6800GS louder than any other fan (and it's fairly quiet). To note, these numbers are what the BIOS reports (And I use AI Booster inc. with the ASUS mobo to check in real time the temp):

@ ~1400RPM:
Idle: 48C
Load: 60C

@ ~1850RPM:
Idle: 43-44C
Load: 54C

@ ~2400RPM:
Idle: 41-42C
Load: 50C

I played BF2 at 1600x1200, 4xAA and all settings maxed to get these numbers, ideally, to get close to what most users would experience in a typical (or not so typical) gaming environment.

Mobo is mounted vertical, to note. As well, I included 1850RPM because for me, that seems to be the 'sweet spot' where the volume of the fan doesn't increase significantly, yet it yeilds rather good results overall. Your milage may vary.

And finally, my nickname doesn't mean what I tested on, OS wise. ;) I used WinXP Pro for all these tests.

Got the Zalman 9500 and if you want to overclock I can see no better air cooling solution, put an 80mm in the top of ya case and lower the temps even further inside
Got a 3700+ clocked to 2750Mhz and running prime for 24hrs the temp never went over 43'C

Hello Doors4ever,

Wow! What an Outstanding comparison article!! I just purchased a Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Cooler, and I want to tell you it was a snap to install! I tried using a COOLER MASTER KHC-L91-U2 92mm Ball Cooling Fan/Heatsink Cooler, but it failed to cool my Intel Pentium 4 511 533MHz FSB LGA 775 EM64T. Fortunately the CPU rebooted to prevent thermal damage to my system as the CPU temperatures reaced 70 C.

Then I tried the Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Cooler and was able to install it within 10 minutes. It passed the bootup test with Awesome Results. My Idle temperature went from 43 C to 31 C, and during my "full load test" the CPU temp never went above 42 C. (I was using the stock Intel CPU cooler.) The Zalman CPU cooler is simply Awesome!! I wish I had found your article 2 days earlier...I wouldn't have wasted my time trying the Cooler Master product. I would have purchased the Zalman without any hesitation.

I found your review to be most informative, clearly written, and full of numerous hints! I sincerely hope you continue to evaulate and write more articles I certainly am interested in reading them. Thank you once again, for writing such a thorough review!

Best Regards,
Starship

I just installed the Zalman 9500LED in my system I can notice the difference right away. My system was running with the original amd fan at about 56~64 celcius and up and right after I installed the zalman fan and immediately noticed the temperature dropped to 35~40 degrees celcius immediately. The motherbaord temperature dropped from 45 celcius to 25 celcius. Further more, it is now so quiet I can only hear the hard drives spinning, my keyboard clacking and myself breathe. =) I absolutely love it.

Fantastic! I have been looking for comparable reviews of these coolers for days. This article is fantastic and the diligence of the author/reviewer deserves priase. Thank you for a great review!

Although I am quite familiar with ThermalTake and Zalman as well as heat pipes, I am not familiar with what is meant by "heat lane" technology. It would have been informative to see some description in greater detail on what and how that idea works. I am not surprised at how the Zalman and Thermaltake top models scored. I know that some TT models are better lapped than others and most Zalman models I have used have always been polished extremely well. The Sonic Tower would best be used in non-overclocked systems obviously. Let's put some peltier plates under the same heatsinks and give a shot at seeing if there is enough heat dissipation ability to function in those extreme conditions with the top 3 contenders here.

some more collers should join in the test ;)
pretty dettailed one .. very good work

nice

There is another round up that has more updated CPU coolers over here: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&am ;task=view&id=45&Itemid=1