Part One: Zalman Coolers
Zalman first came to my attention in the days of socket 462 and AMD Athlon chips, they had an aftermarket heatsink that produced very good temps with very little noise, a very rare thing back then! Since that point Zalman has continued to come out with interesting and effective coolers, I’m sure you’ve seen something from their Orb series at some point! At CES Zalman had a couple brand new coolers they were showing off. Both of them are innovative enough that they got the coveted CES Innovation awards! That’s a good trick these days, most heatsink strategies have been played out by this point.
The first cooler we’ll look at is Zalman’s take on the All In One water cooling market. It’s an Orb type cooler, very different than the usual setups. The name is a bit up in the air at the moment, but it sounds like it will be known as the C.I. Water Cooler.
No standard radiator here! Lots of surface area too, Zalman said it’s along the lines of a 240mm radiator performance wise, but of course it fits a 120mm fan opening!
Hit Read More for another pic, as well as to see Zalman’s other CES award winning cooler, a case, PSUs, and more!
The first cooler we’ll look at is Zalman’s take on the All In One water cooling market. It’s an Orb type cooler, very different than the usual setups.
No standard radiator here! Lots of surface area too, Zalman said it’s along the lines of a thick 240mm radiator performance wise, but of course it fits a 120mm fan opening! he name is a bit up in the air at the moment, but it sounds like it will be known as the C.I. Water Cooler.
Here we (they, I suppose) have it installed:
The hoses are on the short side, this is nice from a clutter standpoint but could be an issue in some cases in theory. The mounting brackets were not shown at CES, I’m curious what they’ll look like.
Now on to the second cooler, the Zalman Cube!
The cube is aimed at passive cooling and hence complete silence. It does have room for a 92mm fan right in the middle, you can see the gap. That increases the max theoretical wattage from something a bit under 100w to something over 200w.
From the side you can really see how wide the fin spacing is, this is crucial for passive airflow.
Installed you can get a feel for how big the cooler is, it’s not small!
It does sit nice and high though, few sticks of RAM are going to have any issues.
Also on the cooling end of things, Zalman makes some GPUs with custom heatsinks as well. This is a low end card, but the cooler is far better than what you usually get. Usually this would have a tiny little heatsink smaller than the fan on this card is!
Zalman is also involved in higher end GPUs. Zalman has some AMD cards as well that use custom coolers, unfortunately my camera decided to eat all the pictures I took of them, other than this pic.
Whether we’ll ever see these cards outside of Asia is hard to say, I’m hoping so personally.
