Zalman come out on top form the most budget type cooler I could think of right now, se we try to look at some of the product for the previous LGA775 socket platforms, well Zalman have some other products in their stock but we more look at the cooling abilities of their products, PSU’s and other power PC components normally look for more experienced makers (Antec, CoolerMaster and Thermal take just to name a few)
Rather what we see in the Zalman product lines are those tower like CPU coolers like the CNPS9000 that I just reviewed earlier, for those people who have boards that is littered with high rise compartment fins and no other space to install the cooler, but for those low profile board, with no or little use of the chipset kitchen heat-sinks this type of low down cooler night look good for the price. With copper and aluminum fins crowding around the large LED fan that goes up to speed of 2.400rpm but still has some vibration and noise whirring problems, but all in all with silent mode it doesn’t make a whiff of sound. With the base also mixed of pure copper in the middle and also pure aluminum in the surrounding areas giving the most point in the middle the more heat-transfer like the copper compound metal effectively spreading the heat around the fan to blow the heat away.
Well installation is a bit of a 5min annoyance with some of the part sometimes fall off or hard to coordinate when you have little or no space to see the socket holes but in the AMD platform felt a bit easier to install. While we have some time installing it we have a pre-installed one for the purpose of testing in stress test; in idle it shows that it relatively runs at 32 degrees and sky rockets to 55 degrees but just able to give more clock speeds it just crashed at a shy 120Mhz from the previous 3.0GHz frequency in the QX6850 going s much as 60 to 67 degrees while at load. This heat sink and fan are definitely not for those who want to overclock. Fan speeds never hit max with or without the fan controller also you would expect more of a drop in temperature with an aftermarket fan. I would recommend this fan for the average daily user it’s a nice looking addition for your rig and with Zalmans, How to Install Video it makes it easy for even a novice to install this fan.
First of all we liked the cooler that Zalman has made, but with some weak point in installation and also with the loud vibration and fan noise, but for those people who like cheap third party cooler and never have experience in over-clocking, this is a Zalman cooler for you.
