Comdex 2002 - New Meaning To The 'Cold Show'

Zalman

While cruising along, we stopped by a personal favorite, Zalman. The Korean HSF company has poured a significant amount of money into research and development lately, so we were very anxious to see some of the new products they were working on. First on their list of products they demonstrated was the 400W PSU based on their same technology packages as the 300W PSU’s available now. Zalman has lost a lot of ground against the big PSU manufacturers because they did not have a high output solution.

More exciting was their new HSF combo, which is universal for both K8 and Pentium 4 processors. We were given a few early specifications on this HSF, and we were impressed with the demonstration given to us on the floor. The CNPS7000-Cu weighs in at 775g and is almost entirely copper. Even more impressive was the fan which never peaked over 32dBA, but on average ran around 26dBA.

What is the selling point on these heatsinks? They are capable of running at 0.20C/W. Currently, this is the lowest thermal resistance we have seen on a P4 or a K8 solution for cooling. We will be very excited to get our hands on one of these HSF combos in the upcoming months. Also visible in the bottom left of the image is a fanless Radeon 9700 heatsink. One Radeon 9700 manufacturer, Sapphire, is pursuing Zalman’s fanless solution (which runs the GPU 5 degrees Celsius cooler than the OEM ATI fan) so expect to see it available on multiple cards in the future.