Zalman have unveiled their latest innovative water cooling solution. The Reserator 3 is a closed loop CPU cooler which uses a standard heatpipe heatsink with a water cooling pump. Unlike conventional closed loop water coolers which pump water into a radiator the Zalman Reserator pumps water through the heatpipes into a standard aluminium fin heatsink. Thus this CPU cooler is more like an air/liquid cooler hybrid as opposed to being strictly a closed loop liquid cooler.
The core of the design is manfactured by Asetek, though Zalman have been given quite a lot of room for their own customisations. The design draws inspiration from Zalman’s CNPS series of air coolers and features a lot of chrome plating. The whole unit is ventilated by a custom Zalman 120mm fan. In total Zalman say this unit is capable of supporting thermal design powers of up to 400W meaning this can handle every consumer processor on the market with some serious overclocks.
Pricing isn’t going to be cheap. In the UK we are seeing the Reserator 3 MAX product stocked at QuietPC for a retail of £100.00 including sales tax/VAT. Expect other pricing to be similar, in the USA we will probably see pricing in the region of $150 depending on sales taxes.
Image courtesy of Zalman
Sexy !. A number of interesting features- from the radiator to the nanofluid.
Checked Zalman’s website. A bit suspicious though that no pump MTBF (or much other data about it) is mentioned. Tubing ?. No info on warranty yet ?.
Maybe I’m neurotic :-), but I’m more concerned about durability and longevity of AIO coolers- than every last degree of performance. Don’t get me wrong: More performance is always a good thing, and water’s purpose is that it can take performance beyond the limits of air cooling. Also in fairness, Asetek coolers claim to be server grade (passing exacting durability tests) and rated over 5 years service @24/7 use, comfortably exceeding the service life without maintenance of a workstation.
Good AIO coolers already deliver great performance. It’s the risk of failing/leaking under long term heavy use that’s a big hang up for some. I’d be willing to pay a fair bit for AIO with an >5 year life year guaranteed. I have many capable Core 2 Quad systems, air cooled, that have been running 24/7 since 07′ without a single issue (apart from a hard drive upgrade and a clean).
Nice looking cooler from Zalman, but if it’s reliability characteristics aren’t compelling, not too interesting.