Zalman CNPS7000-Cu CPU Cooler Review
By: Micah M. Deyton

Recently, I received notification that I was selected to review the ‘Zalman CNPS7000-Cu Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler’ and honestly, I had a mixed reaction. I have purchased and worked with numerous products that make an assortment of claims and promises and in my experience. When adjectives and adverbs are adopted as part of the official product label, the items typically fail to meet my expectations.

To make things worse, ‘Ultra’ appears in a muted yellow separate from the rest of the wording on the packaging. Now I'm on the defensive.

I do note that the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu heatsink bears a ‘2002 Best of Comdex Finalist’ tag from ‘PC Magazine’ - but does that really mean anything? Isn’t this basically just an award for who looks the coolest? I have fallen for that trick in the past, and I really don’t look forward to pulling the old dust sucker apart just to be disappointed again... but to be fair though, this is one awesome looking heatsink and fan combo.

A second reason I approach this with apprehension is the sheer bulk of the product. The packaging is designed to hang on a peg hook, but I doubt that an industrial strength hook could hold more than two or three of these. In short, the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu is one large heatsink, and it weighs a considerable amount.

Given the size of the heat sink, I am not sure that this will even fit on my motherboard - seriously, if you hold up a CD in front of the heat sink they are the same diameter. Officially, the size is listed as 109x109x62mm. With a height of 62mm, this also makes the CNPS7000-Cu a moderately tall heat sink. Basically, I am still dreading the whole installation and testing thing (and I am one of you freaks who loves this kind of stuff).

Ok… If you haven’t quit reading and decided that I am the most negative reviewer ever, this is where the tide turns.

Firstly, the CNPS7000-Cu (Computer Noise Prevention System… got curious… went to website… deciphered the acronym… Cu= Copper) includes the ‘Fan Mate’ speed adjuster for the cooling fan. This is a nice plus as I have tried these with other setups in the past and they seem to work very well.

Secondly, the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu has one of the most stable and user friendly (easy) retention mechanisms I have worked with. A simple screw system secures the heatsink to your motherboard easily, and perhaps more importantly, very snugly.

With other heatsinks there have been issues which affected how well the cooler made contact with the processor heat spreader, but this is not the case with the CNPS7000-Cu. The coverage over the heat spreader was complete. Additionally, the copper contacts were highly polished and needed no additional lapping or finishing on my part.

To my surprise, the size of the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu did not interfere with any of the capacitors around the socket on any of the pentium 4 motherboards I tried this cooler on. Apparently, a lot of care has been put into designing the cooling fins to avoid such issues, and the heatsink slickly avoids any and all contact with motherboard components. This takes care of one of my concerns. Credit to Zalman on this as even smaller heat sinks have caused spatial conflicts in the past.

Now to fire up the system and get some impressions…

I have to admit to this even though I feel a bit silly saying so. I originally assumed that I screwed up the install of the CNPS7000-Cu (this thing could use a shorter name) because it was too quiet. Upon inspection, I realized that it was running properly and that it truly was quiet, if not ‘Ultra Quiet’.

Gone was the constant high pitched whine or… hiss... I'm not sure how to describe it actually. You know that sound that every heatsink, power supply, and case fan makes? Well, it wasn’t there.

This wasn’t the only difference though. Oddly, there was more noise missing.

My Computer sits in my living room along with my TV and Audio / Video equipment. I've gotten used to that hiss sound but now something else was missing too. I checked the case fans and power supply and couldn’t narrow it down. It felt, or perhaps sounded is more appropriate, as if one of my hard drives had quit but all appeared to be functioning properly.

After some trial and error I discovered the cause of the silence - or rather the cause of the noise that was now missing, hence causing silence. [Ed. Micah does like to make things complicated doesn't he?] The Zalman CNPS7000-Cu fan was so well balanced and stably mounted to the board that it created virtually no vibrations .

Honestly, I had never noticed that the vibrations from heatsinks' fan were also audible, but I guess they rattled the board and case. I'd just assumed that what vibrations were noticeable were from disk drives, case fans or power supply. I would be very interested to have a more scientific measure of this, but you have to rely on my impressions, and well, I am impressed.

I overclock (shhh don’t tell anybody… it may void my warranty) and Zalman recommends that you use the ‘Normal’ mode on the FanMate controller as apposed to ‘Silent’ mode when pushing your equipment beyond manufacturer specified frequencies (sorry, thesaurus has no entries for ‘overclock’). Even in ‘Normal’ mode, this is one quiet and low vibration device.

So how well does it cool? Lacking any scientific measurements, I again will fall back to impressions.

As I stated, I do overclock and have pushed my system to its limits. I am happy to say that I did not have to change the clock speed settings with the CNPS7000-Cu in place. As I lack the ability to offer scientific measures at this time, let me just state that I was able to push a few more MHz out of the system with the new setup. Absolutely no stability issues or noticeable heat related issues either.

In conclusion: I guess I owe Ziff Davis an apology as it appears that PC Magazine knew that had their hands on a good thing. The Zalman CNPS7000-Cu Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler not only lives up to its moniker, it is definitely the best CPU cooler I have ever installed and used. I am very pleased with the results and hope to install other Zalman products soon (that silent Power Supply is looking might tasty about now).

Thanks again to Zalman and FrostyTech.com for the opportunity to test this great product.