Product Reviews

Zalman makes a large range of quiet heatsinks. The CNPS9500 LED is a huge copper heatsink for all current desktop Intel and AMD processors.

Fitting the heatsink is simple thanks to the comprehensive instructions. The CNPS9500 is huge, though, and we had to remove the side exit fan from our test case to make it fit. The heatsink comes with a rheostat that controls the fan's speed, which you plug in between the heatsink's fan and the CPU header on the motherboard.

The fan is quieter than AMD's standard cooler at both minimum and maximum speed settings, and its cooling performance was similar at the slowest speed setting. This is a well-designed and quiet heatsink, but it is expensive.