Zalman CNPS 8000 Tested

If you’re sick of your standard HSF, Zalman is here to help.

CNPS 8000 is the latest addiction to the series of coolers Zalman produces. It looks as sleek as ever, making me think people from Zalman watch fashion channels a lot. No surprise here. When you start to get beyond the appearance and you get a little technical, you will see the air fins carefully oriented, the 4 massive heatpipes coming from the back plate, which - by the way - is polished enough, so you won’t run into any irregularities if you look at it closely. The cooler is pretty light at 350 grams, but it also occupies a lot of space around the CPU base, heatsink+fan dimensions (mm) being: 108(L) X 108(W) X 62.5(H) mm.

Don’t let the fact that it can be mounted on socket 754/939 as simple as you can use it with your LGA 775 fool you. It even fits AM2 socket but you’d better have enough free space around your socket and no capacitors around if you want it to work as it should.

The fan is a 92mm custom designed using 2 voltage settings: 5V and 11V; accordingly, it has 2 rotational speeds: 1400 rpm @18db and 2600 rpm @ 30 db.

Using a PC in full load will result in an operating temperature 5 to 10 degrees lower than a stock cooler. For example a Venice 3000+ @ 2.4GHz CPU running Prime95 at stock speed goes as hot as 44 Celsius degrees with the Zalman cooler set on 11V and 47 Celsius degrees with the fan set on low speed (5V). The stock cooler keeps the same CPU at 46 Celsius degrees.

Overall, it’s a pretty good heatsink, especially when it runs at low speeds, making it hardly audible. Increasing the speed also boosts efficiency, but I have to say that it becomes pretty noisy.