Click for enlargement:







more pics after the link:
http://www.cloudworld.net/diary/index.p ... 2005-04-18


Kudos to Ralf Hutter's post about Zalman fan swap.

man that is so nice! man I might get one instead of a xp120 but I wonder how well it works underload since that heatsink doesn't have heatpipes.

It works well. I did the same thing to my 7700-Cu also with a nexus fan, running it at 400 rpm is plenty for a 3500+ Winchester but im running it at 700 rpm because its still not audible and it cools the surrounding area better, just one or two degrees difference on the CPU. @700 rpm tunning F@H temperature never rises over 38c according to mobo, idle temp is just a few degrees lower at about 34c.

So overall the heatsink works very well, but the stock fan is poop and only goes down to 1000rpm with the fanmate.

i was considering thermalright xp-90/xp-120 at the time, but my mobo is a gigabyte k8ns ultra-939, according to thermalright, gigabyte k8 mobo use a proprietary mounting plate and need to purchase a thermalright plate to work with their coolers. i have no access to that mounting plate locally, and the price different between the zalman and the thermalright is pretty big, so i chose the zalman.

the zalman 7700 is not quiet at all even at 5V. but the mod is very successful. very quiet, and the heatsink only touches a little warm under load, i check the CPU temp in the bios a few times then decided i'll never worry about the temp.

the big 7700 also provides some cooling to ram, mosfet, the video card. it's huge. but the stock 7700 is far far away from "quiet".

that is pretty damn cool, I'll probably do the same thing with my Zalman as the fan even at 5V is making too much noise, the loudest part in my computer by far.

what did you use to drill the holes in the nexus fan?

a 12V hand drill, smallest drill bit in my box is a 2mm one, there are spare srews in 7700 package that fits well

ok I swapped the crappy Zalman with a Nexus 120mm...

Let me tell you that first of all I'm not a technically inclined kind of guy, my idea of a mod is to use some zip ties.

Anyway that was quite an adventure. First of all I didn't realize the depth of the fan at the base was different compared to the stock Zalman fan. At least by 1 cm. So If I were to simply screw the fan onto the metal bracket, the fan would have scraped the heatsink.

So a trip to Home Depot I take and get some rubber washers. I stack about 4 of them and super glue it onto the fan and the bracket.

Next the screw I had was too short and another one I had was too wide lol. I got one which was a decent fit but I had to clip the tip a bit because it would have scraped the fan....

Last step was to mount the HS onto the motherboard, screw it in and voila...Took me the better part of half a day to do the damn thing. I hope the screw and super glue will keep the fan mounted onto the bracket lol...

Anyway I'm really happy with the nexus, it is one hell of a quiet fan. I think I'm going to swap out the stock case fan and also the other vantek that I have. The stock fan is actually pretty quiet at 5v, Vantek is anything but "stealth". But wow I'm a Nexus convert, this thing is reallllly quiet.


Conclusions:

Zalman fan sucks donkey balls.

Nexus fan is really really quiet, I'm impressed.