Zalman CNPS 8700 LED Heatsink Review

The Zalman CNPS 8700 heatsink was tested with our current standard test machine, the [OC]ModBox, which includes the following hardware

• Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo Processor
• Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard
• 4GB A-Data DDR2-800 @ 1000 Hz
• eVGA 8800GT 320MB PCI-e video card
• Soundblaster X-Fi Platinum
• Sony 16X DVD-R burner
• 500GB Western Digital SATA HDD
• Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
• CoolIT Ram Fan

Core temperatures were measured using Intel’s Thermal Analysis Tool (TAT), which measures the internal core temperature of each individual core on the CPU’s die.  Our Asus motherboard can throttle the fan’s speed depending on CPU load and temperature, but we connected the fan directly to a fanmate to measure the temperatures at high and low fan speeds.

	Zalman CNPS 8700 LED Performance measured noise CPU Idle CPU Load Zalman 8700 (high) 40 dBA 35 40 Zalman 8700 (low) 28 dBA 35 41 Zalman 9700 (high) 40 dBA 33 38 Zalman 9700 (low) 30 dBA 35 41 Intel stock cooler (high) 45 dBA 39 48 Intel stock cooler (low) 30 dBA 40 53

It may seem a bit unfair to compare this heatsink with a much larger heatsink, but we wanted to show the dynamics between these two products.  The Zalman 8700 performs much better than a Intel’s OEM heatsink, but of course doesn’t do as well as Zalman’s current flagship.  The 8700 holds its own when you remember that it has only half the mass of the 9700, so it is one of the better-performing heastsinks for its size.