CES 2012 Day 3 Coverage Review - PAGE 1

Zalman Tech Co. is a company that nearly every serious computer enthusiast has heard of and most likely owned one of their products. Founded in 1999, they have pushed the boundaries of cooling performance and blew away the preconception that heatsinks had to be boring square things with no pizazz. Probably their most notable heatsink offerings are the iconic "flower" designs and the Zalman 7000 designed for Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 series of processors. These designs have proven to be solid and obviously were the precursors to the the CNPS 8900 that was on display at the show.

They showcased both an "Extreme" and a "Quiet" design that only differed in the design of the embedded fan. I would imagine that fan rotational speed would make the difference, but nothing was mentioned specifically on the little product cards that accompanied the HSFs. The previous heatsink designs are meant for low-profile cases and instances where you want to maximize your cooling performance while staying within noise and dimensional tolerances. For real extreme cooling of today's silicon, one would prefer the double or triple fan monstrosities that contain a bazillion heat pipes. Zalman didn't disappoint in this regard with their CNPS10X Optima, the CNPS12X, and the CNPS9900 MAX. These heatsink and fan weombos are so massive that I would triple check the space available in your case just to make sure they will fit. They didn't have any of these heatsinks hooked up and working, probably because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would forbid it. (i.e. only a nuke could produce the level of heat required to make these heatsinks truly shine)

Listed in order of appearance below, the CNPS11X Performa, the CNPS 9900 MAX, the CNPS10X OPTIMA, and the CNPS12X were all set up on a variety of Gigabyte motherboards with some very nice looking but low profile HyperX RAM sticks. Set ups like these really give an indication of just how large these chunks of copper and aluminum truly are!

Zalman also had a single closed-loop water cooling system on display this year. The CNPS 20LQ sees the pump and reservoir all contained within the radiator block, thus giving this model a very slim design with the bare minimum number of hoses needed. This water cooler was installed on a running system that will be expanded on later in this article.

Zalman has long been making after-market cooling applications for GPUs as well, and this year they had on display two cards apiece from AMD and nVidia using their coolers. In order from top left to bottom right are their cooling solutions for the HD6850-H, the 6770-Z, the GTX550-Ti, and the GTX560-Ti. All these cards come with some serious metal attached, but they all remained two-slot cooling solutions.

I must admit that I was rather surprised to see power supplies with the Zalman brand on them at their booth this year. Power supplies are not something that I would immediately associate with Zalman, but they had quite a range of PSUs on display ranging in storage capacities from 450W to 750W. Zalman does offer a 1kW PSU as you will see below, but for some reason they did not have it on display with the rest of their PSUs.

After talking with a company representative for a while, I can now clearly see the direction that the company is trying to take itself. They built their name and reputation on enthusiast level cooling solutions that performed and were quiet; for instance I doubt that anyone will forget the Reserator that they released way back in 2005. This year however, Zalman is trying to focus on being able to build an entire computer from parts that they either manufacture or at least had some role in designing (like the heatsinks).  The rig shown below contains Zalman heatsinks on both the processor and the graphics card, as well as a Zalman power supply and SSD hard drive. Everything was then assembled in a Zalman case with a Zalman branded mouse and keyboard hooked up to it.

This is quite a feat because that means Zalman now has its fingers in a lot of pots. I just hope that going in this direction does not spread them too thin and make them lose sight of what made them a house-hold name in the first place. The case used in this build is the brand new Z11 Plus shown below. Unfortunately we only have that one photo snapped of the case, but from what I was able to see of it it looked like a beast; and knowing that it is from Zalman means that it should cool like one as well. Hopefully one of these will find its way across my desk soon so that I can review it for you readers out there. Also displayed were the Z9 Plus and the full-tower GS1200 that has mounting holes for seven 120mm fans. 

Zalman has also entered into the solid state hard drive market usually dominated by bigger and older names like Western Digital and Seagate. However I believe that these might be solid offerings, with the SATA-III based F-Series claiming face-melting transfer speeds of 560MB/s and 530MB/s (Sequential Read/Write) while the SATA-II based P-Series offering respectable performances at 245MB/s and 115MB/s (Read/Write). However I also remain slightly skeptical since the documentation provided in the press kit mentions that the speed ratings are for "Compressible Data." Zalman also has a line of external hard drive and optical drive enclosures that will keep your hardware safe and cool in solid aluminum housings. No word as of yet concerning pricing for any of these pieces.

Rounding out their booth was a display containing two new laptop coolers: the ZM-NC11 and the ZM-NC3500 Plus. I myself own an older version of the ZM-NC1000 and I must admit that it has performed admirably over the years. Finally, there were several mice on display that seemed like re-branded generic laser mice (in my opinion). I was quite pleased however to see that the one with the silver highlights, the ZM-GM1, boasted of an impressive 800 to 6000 adjustable DPI setting. With the large desktops and the multi-monitor set-ups that people have these days, a mouse like this would be quite awesome.