Good review. I'm glad you adjusted the conclusion to show that someone not so keen on silence would appreciate it more.

I'm curious how much better the Quiet version is.

There is now a whole family of CNPS10X coolers including the Quiet, and the Performa. The Performa is interesting http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/amx-coolers/cnps10x-performa because it has a PWM fan combined with a 4 wire equivalent of the traditional Zalman fan resistor cable.

And the complete Performa package is priced in the UK at around 60% of a Prolimatech Megahalems without fan.

It's nice to see that Zalman has brought out a more affordable full size cooler. Of course, if someone were to add fans from someone like Noctua or Gelid, the price would go right back up to where the other expensive coolers are.

I'm still curious about the CNPS10X QUIET, which has noticably wider fin spacing and a slower fan. It's almost as if Zalman was thinking of SPCR when they designed it. A review at Tweaknews showed that it cooled better than both the CNPS9900 and the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme! And in another review, they showed that it cooled better than the 10X Extreme.

http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=355

there must be thousands of cpu coolers out there, they all are pretty much 90% alike. why won't these manufactures put out something new?

i wonder why we keep buying new coolers for new cpu's everytime, motherboard manufactures should just stick with one cpu rentention system so cpu coolers can be reused over and over again. you can save hundreds of dollars over the years.

expxe

Noctua does a good job of making their coolers transportable from socket to socket.

They even avoid the direct contact heat pipe design in order to better maintain performance from socket to socket.

With the 1156 socket, they even gave free adapters out to buyers who bought pre-1156 heat sinks from them

In the 2010 Heatsink Test Platform thread, someone points out that only two memory DIMMs are being used on a triple-channel capable platform. If the photo of the Zalman CNPS Flex installed on the motherboard is correct, those two DIMMs are both on channel A, giving single channel performance. Personally, I can't see anyone using a 1366 setup in this way.

I have tried three Zalman CNPS fans:

CNPS10x Quiet - nice - fan was pretty silent, but due to mounting mechanism, it would not fit on my AM3 motherboard and allow the first 2 RAM sockets to be used. It also blew air to the top of the case rather than out the back.

CNPS9900 NT: replaced the 10x Quiet - would run pretty much as quiet as the 10x Quiet, but when the CPU was loaded, the fan noise was much harsher.

CNPS10x Flex: current fan - I have it with a Scythe slim pushin air through and a S-Flex pulling air out. The new mounting bracket allows it to be mounted correctly. I would say it sounds pretty much as quiet with these two fans (usually running about 800rpm) as the 10x Quiet did.

I am pretty much sorted with the flex

CNPS10x Flex:


CNPS10x Quiet:


CNPS9900 NT:

I've been using one of these on my i7 2600k rig, but having been getting the cooling performance I thought should. It was bad enough during media encoding, the machine would start thermally throttling itself.

I figured that I'd pull the cooler, clean the heatsink, cpu cap and reapply some arctic silver 5. When I got it all back together and ran a test encode it was worse, a lot worse. CPU would go from a reported 36c to 92c in a second, which I knew was way off.

Pull everything apart again only to see that the middle portion of the heatsink was still shiny. It wasn't even making contact with the cpu cap! The culpret ended up being a short hair that must have fallen on the cpu cap before I attached the heatsink.

Once I got the hair off, smoothed out the thermal grease and put things back together, things are running the way I expected them to the first time around. Now when the cpu is banging away at an encode, the Asus app reports motherboard temp of 36c and cpu temp of 70c. Suffice to say I'm a lot happier, but may still switch to a Prolima Tech Genesis when they become available.