I ran across an article at Tom's Hardware which highlighted a new passive CPU cooler that was shown at CES 2013. There is only a little information given. The pictures are quite large and detailed for what little they show. Click on a picture in the article, to expand it. Then click on it again to open it full screen in a new browser window. Finally, depending on your monitor and video card you may have the option to click on it again to view it at full resolution.

The passive cooler is obviously the cube-shaped gadget pictured on the left of the article. Optionally it can have a 92mm PWM-controlled fan installed. Might be interesting to examine and evaluate when it arrives in stores.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/PAssive-Water-Cooling-CES-FX100-Cube-Reserator,20429.html

Interesting to get some more info, pictures where leaked back in November http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=65355

One thing that stood out from Tom's HW article is the mention of 10 heatpipes, how on earth can you fit 10 in the size of the CPU die ?
And the mention of "maximized heat transfer ability" shame they don't mention how much maximum is

It could be 5 U-shaped heat pipes. Many companies count them as if each is 2 heatpipes which functionally is correct I suppose.

Looks about Ninja sized.

read in between the lines, zalman themselves said you need a cooling fan. In their case, a 92 mm fan. The fan noise will be quite high as the diameter of the fan is too small

They say its optional, or do you have a link with some more details ?

rather bigger I think, Zalman FX100-Cube is reported as being 150 x 150 x 157.5 mm

pretty much kills my interest in this one (I use µATX and mini-ITX so even 140mm wide coolers are a PITA, 150mm would be impossible to deal with)

if that block can clear the heat, then there is no need for any optional fan, would it?

Well that all depends on how much heat we are talking about
They have yet to release any figures on how much it can handle AFAIK.

New final spec details from Fanlesstech: http://www.fanlesstech.com/2013/02/zalm ... specs.html

usefully it has a decent looking offset, so the size might not be so difficult to accomodate:

Nice to get some more info though i was hoping they would publish the TDP it can handle without needing the fan.
Found another link with some more info.

http://www.custompcreview.com/articles/ces-2013-zalman-cnps-fx100-cube-fanless-cpu-cooler/17018/

Also just found this YouTube clip saying it can dissipate around 75W

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oPfk3WcwsQs#t=174s

Couldn't work out how to embed the clip, can we do that ?

Some more news, well a review actually.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cooling/2013/03/08/zalman-fx100-cube-review/1

I saw that earlier and wasn't impressed by Bit-tech's effort. It looks like yet another failure to understand the fanless product, it's not for i7 2600Ks and overclocking, and not for comparing with Silver Arrows, NH-D14s and Megahalems etc.

I think an ideal review roundup of fanless would include: Silverstone HE02, Nofan, HR02/HR22, the new Deepcool, maybe Prolimatech (mentioned by Fanlesstech as a rumour) and compare 45W, 65W and 77W CPUs at stock. Then we'll see how they perform at the intended function.