had it a week, figured a mini review since I'm bored and have nothing else to do.
It clearly states "ultra quiet" on the fan, wtf? This is my 2nd Zalman product, the other was ages ago and I don't remember much about it. At 100% this sucker is super loud, I'm not sure what rpm they used to think that statement should fly. At 65% it was mostly quiet, but really that makes having a cooler like this kind of pointless imho.
I was mulling over which fan to replace the "ultra quiet" stock one with. I ended up going with a Cougar PWM one. It looks much nicer if you ask me, but most importantly it's way quieter. While I don't have uber sound equipment to measure actual DB levels, I know what my ears here and don't hear. And @ 100% the Cougar sounds to be about on par with the stock one @ 65%, it might be a hair louder, but it's very reasonable. It's definitely audiable 100%, but cranking it down in speedfan that quickly changes. 100% honestly isn't too loud for me to deal with, but I'm not as sensitive to noise as some so YMMV here. But the bottom line is there's a world of difference with both fans @ full boar.
Don't mind the crappy camera phone pic, or the lack of wire management (working on it lol) This case is the Bitfenix Prodigy AKA a huge ITX case. It's big enough to do extra shat like water cool, but it's too small to do so comfortably. The radiator would definitely have mounted better in the top of the case, but to do so I would have had to remove the 5 1/2 bay. I know a lot of people don't, but I use my ODD almost daily so that wasnt' an option. And while I didn't try, I don't think I could add a 2nd fan for a push/pull configuration. With just 1 it's already sticking pretty far out, and almost blocking the tubing to the heatsink. I don't know if having the tubes this scrunched up is hampering the effectiveness of the cooling or not.
pic from the other side with the video card removed. This case is a bitch to do cable management in. I think my next thing will be to buy an external 5 1/2 enclosure for my Blu-Ray drive so I can remove the bay and mount the rad at the top and do a push/pull thing.
I tried to take a pic of my system on so I could show how the disc in the middle of the heatsink glows, but the pics all came out crappy as hell. It glows blue, not too bright imho, and I like how it looks. My case has no window so it's kind of a whatever thing to me, but it would look pretty sweet in a windowed case. About the pump, I set the fan & the VGA fan to 0 in speedfan and I couldn't hear it running, which is a good thing.
If I'm to believe Coretemp, my system idles at around 29-30 and hits about 40 under load. I OC'ed my 3570k to 4ghz but Windows 8's reporting stock speed. It says 4 in the BIOS though, I don't know what the hell is up with Windows 8, but I'm going to believe it's just reporting it wrong. Any one here can chime in if they know something I don't. I'm running my memory @ stock 1866 and my vcore's un-touched, or at least I didn't change it. I just used ASRock's built in OC setting. It goes up to 4.5 I might try 4.5 and Prime95 tomorrow.
I would say this isn't a good value, it retails for $109, and while the rad is pretty thick @ 49mm, Corsair has a unit with a double rad for about the same price. I'm not sure how the thickness of a shorter rad compares to a longer thinner one *shrug* I got this for $90 with a $20 rebate, so for me it was a good deal. I know there are air coolers that cost less and cool close to as good. But space is super limited on my ITX MB so the space this free's up made it worth the money imho. If you're going to get this I would recommend getting a better fan.
I've never had water before so I can't compare the quality of the tubing to anything else, but this is pretty thick and feels nice. It's not as flexible as I had hoped, but then again since I don't know what's what maybe this is flexible.
1 last thing I'll comment on, the instructions it came with blow chunks. While it wasn't really hard to get installed, a few small details weren't easy for me to figure out. It comes with screws for 1056 + 2011, they're the exact same color and the only difference is the 2011's are a hair shorter. The baggies they all came in nothing was labeled. While I picked the right ones the 1st time, it was more luck than anything. It also comes with mounting equipment for AMD.