Check The Unique Look Of The Zalman CNPS17X

Full Of Hot Air Or A Cool Upgrade?

Zalman can sometimes offer interesting PR along with their products, and the CNPS17X is a good example as the box proclaims this heatsink sports 4D Stereoscopic corrugated cooling fins and RDTH “Reverse Direct Touch Heat” pipes connected to the cold plate.  One should try not to hold that against them as it is the performance on the test bed which matters the most.  The 700g heatsink stands 140 x 100 x 160mm and comes with a 14 mm Dual-Blade spider fan with RGB lighting that is compatible with the vast majority of motherboard light controllers as well as Zalman’s Z-sync software.

TechPowerUp strapped it onto a Core i7-8700K both at 3.7 GHz and overclocked to 4.8 GHz and tested it against the dozens of other coolers currently in their stable.  Their benchmarks show this to be a great fan for overclockers as it matched or out performed much of the competition and could even manage AIDA64’s FPU test while overclocked which not all coolers can manage without throttling the frequency.  At stock speeds it is fair to middling compared to many other coolers, and in either case it is somewhat loud.

With a price tag of $69 and a design which cannot be offset to avoid motherboards that have RAM slots in very close proximity to the CPU socket it is not the best choice on the market at the moment.  On the other hand if you like the look and are looking for very bright RGBs to shine inside your case this is worth a look.