Despite us being a review website that works with most companies in the industry, there is the odd company that often eludes us for various complex reasons I won’t go into. Zalman has been one of those and in my time as the cooling reviewer at eTeknix I have only ever managed to scrape one Zalman product, that was the Zalman ZM-NC3500 Plus notebook cooler. Yet today I am quite excited as I have managed to get my hands on another Zalman product for review courtesy of the awesome guys over at Quiet PC.
Today we have a budget CPU cooler offering from Zalman in the form of the CNPS10X Optima Shark’s Fin CPU cooler. As you can see from the above image it conforms to the typical style of CPU cooler that we’d expect to see in the “budget tower heatsink” market at the £20-£25~ price point. In fact on the face of things it looks practically identical to the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO, Evercool Venti, SilverStone AR01 with the exception of the fan and some marginal design differences on the heatsink.
Thankfully the Zalman CNPS10X Optima Shark’s Fin comes in at the lower end of that price point with a tiny retail price of £20.57 as we write, so let’s see what £20 really gets you these days and see how much this Zalman CPU cooler delivers.
I looked at this cooler a while back and found it’s performance very much on a par with the old CM Hyper 212+ cooler. For it’s price it wasn’t at all bad and it looks nicer.
Good cooler and for the price, performance isn’t bad at all.
And, another good review, ryan!
Would it be possible to install this without removing the motherboard ? I’v got AMD FX 6300 with Antec VSK-4000E case and ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 motherboard? Also would I be able to put a Noctua NF-F12 fan on this?