Zalman CNPS17X Air CPU Cooler Review

Installation

Starting off with the instruction manual, which I always consider a critical part of any CPU cooler, in trust, as noted earlier with the fan you have to assemble yourself, it does appear that a little more cost-cutting has been applied here as, overall, the quality of the paper and printing is rather cheap. – Putting that to one side, however, the diagrams provided within are nicely detailed meaning that you shouldn’t have any difficulties installing this cooler as long as you follow the step-by-step instructions.

Mounting

So, the fan. Well, as noted above, you are required to actually attach the fan to the mounting bracket yourself, and, on the whole, I honestly fail to see why I’m personally required to do this. Yes, I’ve seen it done before, but only often when there is a certain quirk in the cooler design that requires it. – Fortunately, though, it’s only 4 screws and these go in easily enough.

Getting onto a more positive aspect of the design, in terms of fitting the fan to the radiator, this can often be one of the most annoying parts of air cooler designs. You have flimsy metal strips that you have to get hooked onto the fan and then attempt to fit it onto the radiator without cutting yourself on the fins. In a nutshell, I find this design annoying, but it’s sadly the one that most manufacturers seem to be sticking with.

The Zalman CNPS17X has, however, found an ingenious solution to this. Through the utilisation of a clip, that attaches directly to the fan frame, installation is quite possible as easy as it gets.

When in place, the mounting clip simply fits onto the side of the radiator and clamps in place. Do this twice and, that’s it, fan fitted. Just in case you had any concerns that this might be a little loose, I can promise you that this is an exceptionally easy, but snug clamp. Once fitted, I handled the radiator in all manner of directions and the fan refused to budge. Put simply, I hugely approve of this design!

The mounting system for the cooler itself is nice and straightforward and anyone with experience with CPU coolers shouldn’t have any difficulty in getting the Zalman CNPS17X successfully installed. There are some tiny washers, and admittedly, they’re annoying. So if you go to install the Zalman CNPS17X, I strongly recommend that, like our test bench, you have the system in a horizontal position because if you don’t, you might have a pain in making sure they don’t fly off somewhere.

Overall Thoughts

From out the box and onto our test bench, the Zalman CNPS17X took around 10 minutes to install and in terms of ease, well, it’s a case of give and take. Having to physically attach the fan to its surrounding bracket takes time. That time, however, is likely completely restored when it comes to the really simplistic nature of how you attach the fan to the radiator.

There are a number of small parts too, and that can be fiddly work, but on the whole, it’s a pretty decent design, and, if nothing else, it’s nice to occasionally encounter something that’s different from the overall standard methodology, but still manages to not overcomplicate the process.

Once in place, the Zalman CNPS17X looks absolutely fantastic and the ARGB is bright, bold, vivid, and offers a really high level of functionality. With all the colours and patterns on offer, even if you’re not a particularly big fan of RGB lighting effects, they’ll definitely be something to suit your taste here. I mean, even if you absolutely detest ARGB, I personally think that the Zalman CNPS17X easily looks fantastic even with them turned off.

As you can see in the picture below, the fan coverage is absolutely fantastic, and, all going well, this is going to translate into some exceptionally nice results in our testing. With the Zalman CNPS17X fitted to our bench, therefore, and without any further delay, let’s find out just how good this ‘high performance’ cooler really is!