Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU Cooler Review

[nextpage title=”Introduction”]

This time we are testing the Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU cooler. It has a V-shaped heatsink, one 120 mm fan and five heatpipes. Let’s check its performance.

The CNPS11X Extreme box is relatively small, in black shades, as you see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Package

Figure 2 shows what comes with the cooler: thermal grease, manual, and installation hardware.

Figure 2: Accessories

In Figure 3, you can see the Zalman CNPS11X Extreme.

Figure 3: The CNPS11X Extreme

This cooler is discussed in detail in the following pages.

[nextpage title=”The CNPS11X Extreme”]

Figure 4 displays the cooler from the front side, where there is the 120 mm fan with blue LEDs.

Figure 4: Front view

Figure 5 shows the side of the heatsink. Here you can see the five U-shaped heatpipes.

Figure 5: Side view

Figure 6 illustrates the back side of the cooler. At the center, there is a plastic piece that seems to split the heatsink in two.

Figure 6: Rear view

[nextpage title=”The CNPS11X Extreme (Cont’d)”]Figure 7 presents the top of the cooler, where there is a plastic cap with the name of the product.

Figure 7: Top view

Removing that cap and the fan, you can see that actually there are two independent heatsinks. Each one is small and is connected to all five heatpipes. The fan pushes the air into the empty space between the heatsinks.

Figure 8: Without the cap

Figure 9 reveals the base of the CNPS11X Extreme. Like other Zalman coolers, this base is made of nickel-plated copper and has a perfectly mirrored surface.

Figure 9: Base

[nextpage title=”Installation”]

In Figure 10, you can view the Intel clips installed on the base of the cooler. The clips for AMD systems are rather similar.

Figure 10: Mounting clips for Intel CPUs

In Figure 11, you can observe the backplate that goes on the solder side of the motherboard, with the nuts already installed.

Figure 11: Backplate with nuts

At the first time, we installed the CNPS11X Extreme on the position shown in Figure 12. But when we ran the tests, the performance was so poor that we removed the cooler to check installation. We detected that, on this position, one heatpipe was touching the heatsink of the chipset, avoiding contact between the CPU and the cooler with proper pressure.

Figure 12: Installed in our system (bad performance)

So, we remounted the cooler on the position shown in Figure 13. This way, the cooler was properly mounted, and we could make the performance tests.

Figure 13: Installed in our system (good performance)

[nextpage title=”How We Tested”]

We tested the cooler with a Core i7-860 CPU (quad-core, 2.8 GHz), which is a socket LGA1156 processor with a 95 W TDP (Thermal Design Power). In order to get higher thermal dissipation, we overclocked it to 3.3 GHz (150 MHz base clock and 22x multiplier), keeping the standard core voltage (Vcore), which was the maximum stable overclock we could make with the stock cooler. Keep in mind that we could have raised the CPU clock more, but to include the stock cooler in our comparison, we needed to use this moderate overclock.

We measured noise and temperature with the CPU idle and under full load. In order to get 100% CPU usage in all threads, we ran Prime 95 25.11 with the "In-place Large FFTs" option. (In this version, the software uses all available threads.)

We compared the tested cooler to the Intel stock cooler with a copper base (included with the CPU), as well as with other coolers. Note that in the past, we tested coolers with a socket LGA775 CPU, and we retested some "old" coolers with this new methodology. This means you can find different values in older reviews than the values you will read in the next page. Every cooler was tested with the thermal compound that accompanies it.

Room temperature measurements were taken with a digital thermometer. The core temperature was read with the SpeedFan program (available from the CPU thermal sensors), using an arithmetic average of the core temperature readings. During the tests, the left panel of the case was open.

The sound pressure level (SPL) was measured with a digital noise meter, with its sensor placed 4" (10 cm) from the fan. We turned off the case and
video board cooler fans so they wouldn’t interfere with the results. This measurement is only for comparison purposes, because a precise SPL measurement needs to be made inside an acoustically insulated room with no other noise sources, which isn’t the case here.

Hardware Configuration

• Processor: Core i7-860
• Motherboard: Gigabyte P55A-UD6
• Memory: 2 GB Markvision (DDR3-1333/PC3-10700 with 9-9-9-22 timings), configured at 1,200 MHz
• Hard disk: Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB
• Video card: Zotac GeForce GTS 250
• Video resolution: 1680×1050
• Video monitor: Samsung Syncmaster 2232BW Plus
• Power supply: Seventeam ST-550P-AM
• Case: 3RSystem L-1100 T.REX Cool

Operating System Configuration

• Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Software Used

• Prime95
• SpeedFan

Error Margin

We adopted a 2 °C error margin, meaning temperature differences below 2 °C are considered irrelevant.

[nextpage title=”Our Tests”]

The table below presents the results of our measurements. We repeated the same test on all coolers listed below. Each measurement was taken with the CPU at idle and at full load. In the models with a fan supporting PWM, the motherboard controlled the fan speed according to core load and temperature. On coolers with an integrated fan controller, the fan was set at the minimum speed on the idle test and at full speed on the full load test.

		Idle Processor			Processor at Full Load
Cooler	Room Temp.	Noise	Speed	Core Temp.	Noise	Speed	Core Temp.
Intel stock (socket LGA1156)	14 °C	44 dBA	1700 rpm	46 °C	54 dBA	2500 rpm	90 °C
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 G1	14 °C	47 dBA	2050 rpm	33 °C	56 dBA	2900 rpm	62 °C
Zalman CNPS10X Extreme	14 °C	45 dBA	1400 rpm	27 °C	53 dBA	1950 rpm	51 °C
Thermaltake Silent 1156	14 °C	44 dBA	1200 rpm	38 °C	49 dBA	1750 rpm	69 °C
Noctua NH-D14	14 °C	49 dBA	1250 rpm	27 °C	49 dBA	1250 rpm	53 °C
Zalman CNPS10X Performa	14 °C	46 dBA	1500 rpm	28 °C	52 dBA	1950 rpm	54 °C
Prolimatech Megahalems	14 °C	40 dBA	750 rpm	27 °C	60 dBA	2550 rpm	50 °C
Thermaltake Frio	14 °C	46 dBA	1450 rpm	27 °C	60 dBA	2500 rpm	50 °C
Prolimatech Samuel 17	14 °C	40 dBA	750 rpm	40 °C	60 dBA	2550 rpm	63 °C
Zalman CNPS8000A	18 °C	43 dBA	1400 rpm	39 °C	54 dBA	2500 rpm	70 °C
Spire TherMax Eclipse II	14 °C	55 dBA	2200 rpm	28 °C	55 dBA	2200 rpm	53 °C
Scythe Ninja3	17 °C	39 dBA	700 rpm	32 °C	55 dBA	1800 rpm	57 °C
Corsair A50	18 °C	52 dBA	1900 rpm	33 °C	52 dBA	1900 rpm	60 °C
Thermaltake Jing	18 °C	44 dBA	850 rpm	34 °C	49 dBA	1300 rpm	60 °C
GlacialTech Alaska	18 °C	43 dBA	1150 rpm	36 °C	51 dBA	1600 rpm	60 °C
Deepcool Gamer Storm	18 °C	43 dBA	1100 rpm	35 °C	48 dBA	1600 rpm	62 °C
Corsair A70	26 °C	56 dBA	1900 rpm	40 °C	56 dBA	1900 rpm	65 °C
Deepcool Ice Blade Pro	23 °C	45 dBA	1200 rpm	38 °C	52 dBA	1500 rpm	64 °C
AC Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2	23 °C	47 dBA	1750 rpm	44 °C	51 dBA	2100 rpm	77 °C
Corsair H70	27 °C	60 dBA	1900 rpm	37 °C	60 dBA	1900 rpm	61 °C
Zalman CNPS9900 Max	27 °C	55 dBA	1600 rpm	38 °C	58 dBA	1750 rpm	63 °C
Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP	25 °C	45 dBA	1700 rpm	51 °C	49 dBA	1950 rpm	91 °C
CoolIT Vantage	26 °C	60 dBA	2500 rpm	37 °C	60 dBA	2500 rpm	62 °C
Deepcool Ice Matrix 600	25 °C	46 dBA	1100 rpm	41 °C	53 dBA	1300 rpm	69 °C
Titan Hati	26 °C	46 dBA	1500 rpm	40 °C	57 dBA	2450 rpm	68 °C
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13	27 °C	49 dBA	1950 rpm	41 °C	53 dBA	2300 rpm	70 °C
Noctua NH-C14	26 °C	52 dBA	1300 rpm	37 °C	52 dBA	1300 rpm	61 °C
Intel XTS100H	26 °C	49 dBA	1200 rpm	42 °C	64 dBA	2600 rpm	68 °C
Zalman CNPS5X SZ	23 °C	52 dBA	2250 rpm	38 °C	57 dBA	2950 rpm	69 °C
Thermaltake SlimX3	21 °C	50 dBA	2700 rpm	46 °C	50 dBA	2750 rpm	99 °C
Cooler Master Hyper 101	21 °C	50 dBA	2600 rpm	38 °C	57 dBA	3300 rpm	71 °C
Antec Kühler H2O 620	19 °C	52 dBA	1400 rpm	34 °C	55 dBA	1400 rpm	58 °C
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro	20 °C	46 dBA	1100 rpm	36 °C	49 dBA	1300 rpm	62 °C
GlacialTech Siberia	22 °C	49 dBA	1400 rpm	34 °C	49 dBA	1400 rpm	61 °C
Evercool Trans former 3	18 °C	46 dBA	1800 rpm	33 °C	51 dBA	2250 rpm	65 °C
Zalman CNPS11X Extreme	20 °C	51 dBA	1850 rpm	34 °C	56 dBA	2050 rpm	61 °C

In the graph below, at full load you can see how many degrees Celsius hotter the CPU core is than the air outside the case. The lower this difference, the better is the performance of the cooler.

 

[nextpage title=”Main Specifications”]

The main specifications for the Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU cooler include:

• Application: Sockets 775, 1155, 1156, 1366, AM3, AM2+, and AM2 processors
• Dimensions: 5.3 x 3.1 x 6.1 inches (135 x 80 x 154 mm) (W x L x H)
• Fins: Nickel-plated aluminum
• Base: Nickel-plated copper
• Heat-pipes: Five nickel-plated copper heatpipes
• Fan: one 120 mm fan with blue LEDs
• Nominal fan speed: 1,950 rpm
• Fan air flow: Not informed
• Maximum power consumption: Not informed
• Nominal noise level: 33 dBA
• Weight: 1.32 lbs (600 g)
• More information: https://www.zalman.com
• Average price in the US*: USD 90.00

* Researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.

[nextpage title=”Conclusions”]

The Zalman CNPS11X Extreme was made to be a lighweight high-end CPU cooler. However, there is a contradiction between those two statements because an air cooler must be heavy to be powerful. So, the CNPS11X Extreme didn’t show the same performance level as the huge top-shelf coolers with which we are comparing it.

In general, this cooler is a good one. It looks nice, mainly when turned on, with the blue LEDs in the fan. The installation procedure is sturdy and relatively simple (it uses the same system found on other high-end coolers from Zalman, like the Zalman CNPS9900 MAX). When it comes to noise, the CNPS11X Extreme is not really quiet, but it’s not as loud as the real high-end coolers. The price tag is high for the performance it offers.

In short, the Zalman CNPS11X Extreme has more style than performance, thus receiving the Hardware Secrets Bronze Award.