Hype & Reality

The new Zalman CNPS 9500 is a CPU air cooler with the best noise/cooling performance. The web is full of praising words. Zalman's propaganda machine has been very effective (so far, no review of Moyo Go has been published anywhere, I'm envious).

Anyway, I bought two because after years of living and sleeping in my rented 1-room appt., the noise was getting on my nerves. My PC is on 24/7 because that increases reliability (thermal considerations - I am an electronic engineer by education and we learn that it's better to have a constant temperature and constant current instead of on/off/on/off/on..). My supplier sent me only one, but billed me for two. So far not the end of the world. One costs 75 USD here, BTW. Okay. So I mounted the thing and I was surprized how little contact it made with the CPU.

I decided to STW for that model and hey presto, I found a bunch of German folks on a forum who had quite some trouble with the thing. The mounting clip broke. I thought: "Let's look at mine" and sure enough, my clip was half way through..

Zalman has perhaps the world's best CPU cooling solutions. They are creative, innovative and they have a proven track record of producing kick-ass coolers. Yet they managed to produce this utter piece of crap. (If it would have broken off during operation, my damage would have been 1,500 USD for the overheated CPU plus 1,000 USD for the shattered graphics card underneath - without the slightest chance of compensation apart from another one of thouse lousy clips.) And that would be best-case, because that brittle clip broke straight through the middle as well, into three pieces. If a piece would have short-circuited something, the disaster would have been complete.