So it looks pretty, but does it work? well in a word, YES!

My system is currently running an Athlon T-Bird 1.3ghz @ 1485mhz so heat is definatley an issue. The best cooler I had tested was the Thermoengine Delta with the heat pipe, truly an outstanding cooler, but with one drawback - NOISE, it really could wake the dead so when I saw this whilst browsing Overclockers UK catalogue, I thought lets give it a try.

Firstly at £40 including postage and VAT it is not cheap, but it was well packaged, well engineered and came with Thermal paste in a syringe and a nifty tool for levering the bracket onto the socket housing. Here's a picture of the complete kit layed out a=on a sheet of A4 paper to give you the scale of it;

First impressions where ones of quality, and the package comes complete with a "Fanmate" Rheostat to adjust the speed of the large 92mm fan that blows air onto the heatsink. Fitting it to my Abit KG7 mainboard was a painless affair to, thanks in part to the excellent instructions, and more so to the very handy tool the kit provides for firmly levering the bracket onto the socket to secure the heatsink. So lets have a look at the Heatsink fitted to the Abit.

Here we see Mr ThermoEngine, ready for removal after months of loyal, but audibly challenged service.

And now we see Mr Zalman ready to give us the silent cooling treatment

So I ran the system up without the fan fitted, and to my surprise it ran very stable, and peaked out at a CPU temp of 48deg, not exactly cool, but a good indicator that the pure copper heat sink was just sucking the heat away. you can have a look HERE at some screenshots of Motherboard monitor showing temperatures both before and after.

Obviously that temperature of 44deg C whilst not bad for a heatsink alone, is unacceptable in a PC that is going to get heavily loaded with DoD, so new it was on with the fan and the "fanmate" Rheostat. The fan bracket is superbly engineered to give you the ability to mount multiple fans and position them into many different positions when mounted to the chassis in the PCI card retainers, using the extended screws supplied in the kit. The kit's92mm fan comes with a large brass thumbscrew to hold it in place in the slot used to position it.

So after positioning the fan and running it up I took a few screenshots of the temperature displayed by motherboard monitor, and was pleasently surprised, with the side of the case back on, it was SOOOOOOOO much quieter than the old ThermoEngine, but as the saying goes, "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and the trade-off was a couple of extra degrees C of heat, but I can live with that as its well within a self imposed safe limit. Would I reccomend it...well if you wanted quiet, and something a bit "different" then certainly YES!! but if ultimate cooling at any expense was your goal then there are products availible that will reduce the CPU temp by a few degrees C but at the expense of noise.

More info on the cooler can be obtained from Overclockers UK, who shipped mine to me for the next working day, or from Zalman Tech.

Look out for my next temperature reducing article on the Coolermaster drive cooling bays recently fitted to "Thunderbird 1"

Thanks readers

Porksword