Zalman CNPS9500 CPU Cooler

The 9500 is large and we have all ready covered that. The base of the cooler is copper and for the most part, is smooth and reflective. Come to think of it, the whole damn thing is copper. From the base, there are 3 heat pipes that come out of one side, go upward and form a figure eight and come back down into the other side of the base. Along the upper loop of the heat pipes, there are 90 thin copper fins and in the center, there is a transparent fan that moves air across those thin copper fins. Yes, I took the time to count all of the fins and no I don’t have a better hobby.

Now you know about the cooler and its accessories, let’s get to the installation of this baby. As stated above, the 9500 comes with so many mounting selections; you could possibly mount it on your dog. In this case however, it’s going on my Sandy 3700+. Here are the specs of the test bed.

• Processor – AMD 3700+ San Diego 1MB L2
• Motherboard – DFI LanParty Ultra – D
• Power Supply – Ultra X-Finity 500W PSU
• Video Card – eVga 7800 GT
• Memory – 512 x 2 Crucial Ballistix
• Hard Disk – 1 WD Raptor 74 GB / Seagate 160 GB
• Sound Card – Creative Audigy ZS2
• OS – Windows XP Pro / SP2

/Zalman meet Sandy. Sandy, Zalman.

The cooler fit nicely in my case and the option to mount the 9500 4 different ways is nice. In my case, I chose to mount the cooler with the fan sucking air from inside the case and expelling it out across the fins and right out of the my 120mm exhaust as seen in the picture.

There are, like I said earlier, 4 different ways to mount the cooler. Out of those four, you can see which setup I choose. You could possibly mount the fan so it blows downward onto the video card, upward toward the RAM or the exact opposite of how I have mine setup and have the exhaust fan pull air in and into the fan. Obviously some ways are better than others but who am I to judge. All I really want to do is to see exactly how well this gorgeous copper beauty cools my Sandy.

In order to test the cooler, I am going to take the temperatures of the CPU at idle and at full load. The idle temps are going to be easy and to push the Sandy to 100% load; I am going to run CPU burn in for 30 minutes each, with the case door closed. After the half hour expires, I will immediately check the temps with motherboard monitor and record the temperature.