well said. I have a bit of a soft spot for Zalman, as you say in the early days their "flower" coolers were in the vanguard of the silent PC revolution, but now they are only also-rans, at least as far as their air-cooled designs go. how the mighty are fallen....

Strange how they don't realise the noise and averenge performance their coolers suffers from, the really should start thinking of redesigning their highend coolers.

Never been that content with my zalman cpu cooler, sure it performs at 12V but it's very noisy.

I've been happy with my Zalman 9700NT... Since I replaced the fan with a 120mm Scythe Slipstream. I get better cooling with that fan at 1000rpm c/w the stock 92mm at 2400 rpm. Oh, and it doesn't sound like a vacuum anymore either.

As sad as it is to say - I just love the looks of these heatsinks. Look a lot more interesting then the standard tower fan.

WHat I'm wondering is why they keep sending you samples after how truthful you are

Why is it that no manufacture seems to be able to realise that no matter how well designed the heatsink is and how much surface area there is, if all the heat has to get into the heatpipes from such a small contact area like this zalman, your limiting your potential?
Direct contact heatpipes arent perfect, but at least they eliminate 1 more potential bottleneck.

I'm guessing Zalman still has the image. People will keep buying their stuff just because it's Zalman.

The reason that people buy Zalman is because they have visually-pleasing heatsinks that perform well. The 7000AlCu had the perfect balance of price-performance-low noise for Socket A/478 for its time and it's interesting how that design (7700, 8700, VF700 and VF900) has evolved.

A heatsink that would probably bring the SPCR faithful back to Zalman would be something like the 9700 with a standard soft-mounted Nexus-like fan and exposed heatpipe base (like Xigmatek) and a max $50 price tag.

yah, it sells decently well because it's familiar, relatively easy to install and previous consumers probably recall good performance, at least better than stock, and don't really follow the newest designs in cpu cooling. They've kinda established the design as a safe bet, and so it can be found pretty much anywhere IME, whereas no shops around here sell xigmatek or scythe, would have to hit TO for that. Still, I'd be kinda surprised if Zalman doesn't release a new design in the next few months...

I'm surprised they didn't release a new design years ago.

I'm disappointed. Such a company should be able to renew itself and jump on the bandwagon with large towers and such. (eg. Scythe Ninja, TRUE). Or atleast put decent fans in their products. They used to be a good company. Now I think they're just below the industry standard, which is sad.

To me it looks like clever business. Rather than going through the trouble of actually developing a cooler that can run with the best (with today's competition, this is no small feat), they find it easier to milk their current cooler a little more first. Development on this last cooler has probably been minimal simply because it's more like a revision than an actual new cooler. Yet, the average joe in computer land still buys it because Zalman is 'known' to be a good brand.

was my sound messed up or did it sound like a subaru on high idle.

I could have guessed once bigger coolers truly did there jobs, starting back at the prescatts, the products would just get greedy and rather bizarre. Like a subaru in fact.

Maybe they should add vtec and airbags to pc coolers!

I thought so too, that it's meant largely to look stylish, as well as to look like a really effective cooler - in terms of quality as well as design, while keeping it from seeming too extravagant for the average user.

But then, if they wanted to do that, it would seem to make more sense for it to use an 80mm fan, so that clearance issues might be reduced further.

Maybe they intend to make some sort of premium versions of these, ones with actual good fans. Or maybe they'll just phase in new models with better fans.