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Introduction

After a period of insanity where fan speeds were hitting the 7000RPM range, there was a clamor for quieter fans as many end users decided that an absurd amount of noise was no longer an acceptable trade off for performance. Zalman was one of the first companies that embraced this philosophy with novell heatsink designs some passive, some with low noise fans. A few months ago we took a look at what was the biggest heatsink we had seen at the time with the Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu. As far as width goes, it simply dwarfed every other heatsink we have run across in our lab. Today, our eyes have been opened much like Cortez as he spied the Pacific for the first time. Zalman trumps the CNPS7000 with something even bigger, the AlCu 7700.

First Impressions

Huge would be an understatement in describing the 7700 AlCu - I think that it has the distinction for being the first heatsink fan unit where the fan area is wider than a CD.

The 7700 AlCu however was not as heavy as the all copper 7000CU we took a look at because of its hybrid design. Copper runs along the middle but the rest of the fins are made of aluminum. This is an important note as even with the heat spreaders on the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64s, heat dissipation is not consistent across the surface. It is the middle where there is the greatest heat concentration. As we move towards away from the center, temperatures begin in drop. As with the design of the CNPS7000, the contact surface between the processor and the 7700AlCu is actually the individual heatsink fins pressed together to form a solid surface. The fins are thing and flex very easily. One of the main concerns that I had when I first saw the 7700 AlCu is figuring out how this thing would mount to any motherboard. One of the big problems with ambitious heatsink fan designs is the fact that capacitors are often in the way when trying to mount a heatsink. Zalman has a very smart design here with the 7700AlCu - the base of the heatsink is tapered aggressively and it only begins to widen as we pass the general height of the taller capacitors. Even though it looks insanely big, it fit on a group of random motherboards we threw it onto.

One of the things that we really liked about the Zalman CNPS7000 and Gigabyte’s 3DCooler series is the fact that they are able to fit onto every mainstream processor socket type available today. Zalman has included LGA-775 support with the 7700AlCu with a set of new clips which we will take a closer look at.