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Impressions

The Zalman is big and heavy. In fact it is heavy enough to prompt a warning from Zalman when the computer is being moved; it would not be a bad idea to unmount the heatsink to make sure it does not break and smash up other components inside the case. The Zalman has a nice finish. The fins are polished well and really shines. The fins themselves are flexible as they are made of fairly thin copper sheets. The first thing that is noticed is that there are a lot more pieces than the Gigabyte 3DCooler Ultra. For each different processor there is a pair of mounting clips associated with it. The Zalman also comes with a fan control unit. Unfortunately they did not take a cue from Thermaltake and Gigabyte and the fan control unit mounts inside of the case and is not accessible through a PCI slot or 3 1/4" drive bay. This makes the usefulness of the fan control a little suspect.

The Zalman is somewhat reminiscent of the Gigabyte 3DCooler. Instead of the usual distinct fan on top like most coolers, both feature an imbedded fan with fins around the outside. Besides the comparable weight, the similarities end. Zalman takes the width route while Gigabyte uses vertical space to increase surface area, creating two unique looking heatsinks.

The finish on the bottom of the CNPS7000A-Cu is very smooth - noticeably better than that of both the Gigabyte and the Thermaltake coolers we have in the lab but it is not quite as smooth as the Swiftech MCX462. Upon closer inspection the heatsink is constructed very differently from other heatsinks- each of the fins actually forms a section of the contact point. The fins are compacted together from two bolts that go through the center and hold the entire heatsink together.

Installation

We've been a bit spoiled by the tool less design of the 3DCooler series and having to remove the default mounting brackets on the Athlon 64 is a bit of a hassle. P4 owners are a bit luckier as there are metal clips that are inserted into the P4 bracket. A note for those of you who are eyeing this for an Athlon XP- a board with the mounting holes around the CPU socket is needed. This excludes a fair number of boards as some manufacturers removed the holes after AMD dropped it from their specifications. The instructions for the Zalman are good. They illustrate well how to install the brackets for each CPU type. Beyond the removal of the Athlon 64 mounting bracket, it was fairly trivial to attach the heatsink to the processor. The Zalman does not actually rely on clips but on screws so everything is just bolted down. Each different processor type has a different set of clips like the style of the Gigabyte 3DCooler. There are two sets of washer sizes so the screws do not have to eat into the motherboard itself.

The tapered design of the fins should allow the CNPS7000A to fit on even the more crowded Athlon XP based motherboards. The actual profile of the heatsink contact area is not much larger than medium sized heatsink fan units like the Silent Boost and should allow capacitors to fit underneath.

The heatsink plugs into the fanmate control unit which in turn plugs into the motherboard itself. The Fanmate unit is optional and if the heatsink is connected directly to the motherboard it will run at full speed. The ideal situation would be to have some sort of Smart Fan control software like AOpen's SilentTek to control the fan instead of having to open up the case to use the Fanmate unit.