Installation
The back plate is nice and easy to install, just slip the four bolts in to the holes that correspond to your motherboard socket type, then hold the bolts in place with the four slide on plastic clips. You can then use the plastic applicator block to attach a two-sided bonding strip that will hold the kit on to the motherboard to ease installation.
Flip the motherboard over and you can see that the only thing showing through are the four little screw holes on the other end of the bolts.
A little trickier to mount was the bracket, this required 8 small screws around the edge of the pump and can be a little fiddly at first, but I’m certain that it will stay firmly in place as a result.
The hardest part was screwing the pump to the motherboard. Since the pump sits directly on the CPU and tends to slide about until you have the first two screws in place, which was no easy task and having someone to assist in this part of the build would be a big help.
Once powered up we can see the fan and the pump light up with a gorgeous blue LED light. The fan cable that runs from the pump looks neat and tidy, almost stealth like thanks to the black cables, the same cannot be said about the brightly coloured cables for the fan, not sure why these two do not have a matching design.
How come you didn’t test it against the market leader, Corsair?
Their coolers may not be the best but they certainly ship the highest amounts by a long shot.
We will have a 120mm Corsair review soon. I took over cooling reviews from Ryan and started the charts from scratch so that we can rule out any differences in our testing methods. It’ll only be a few weeks before we have nicely populated graphs again 🙂
fair shout
I’ll let you off this time 😛
Haha thanks. But just so you know, Ryan did use the same methods and same testing hardware so you can compare manually, just keep in mind there maybe a few degree variation for things. Ryan may have used more/less thermal paste, had a warmer or cooler office, etc etc.
the moment I saw “stock fans cannot be removed or replaced” it was a no no right away.. won’t recommend this at all. performance is good. the radiator design is pretty good altho it can be improved by better housing (so that all air going thru ain’t escaping thru the sides).
But you can’t replace the fans with your own? are they nuts? LOL
The H80i I have on an i7 3820 oc’ed to 4.3 keeps the cpu at no higher than 32 C in game and it idles at 16-18 C. Looks like the reserator 3 loses in my book.
I have been using Zalman coolers for years, with my current being the CNPS20LQ with 2x Corsair SP120s in a push pull setup. I have a feeling that I will continue using this “sleeper” AIO until it dies. i7 3770K 4.5GHz idles at 12-17’C and never hits 60’C during Prime95. I can play SC2 or BF4 for hours and it never peeks beyond 35’C; Both fans are manually set @ 800RPM and are inaudible.
I was all set to jump on the Reserator 3 Max, but common sense kicked in after I remembered why I upgraded from the CNPS9900MAX…the fan died and I could not replace it.
Zalman’s website has been broken for a while and none of their support email addresses/telephone numbers work. I would stay well away from their products, unless you don’t mind not having any guarantee