When I was setting up a testbed computer I was looking to build something that would run fairly silent  It needed to be silent and cool because it would hidden under my desk in a corner and it would also be folding 24/7. Now why would it need to be hidden? Because I didn’t want my wife knowing I had built another computer, or as she calls them my mistresses. Like a raccoon I was drawn to the plethora of shiny air coolers out there and immediately ruled out anything that didn’t have fan control or looked like it would be noisy. I found myself looking at all the options Zalman offered, their best looking one by far was the 9500 model. It seems this time Zalman took their design for the popular 7000 series heatsink stood it upright and threw three heatpipes on it and called it the CNPS9500. This 9500 heatsink is the first Zalman CPU cooler that makes use of the heatpipe technology. They call this a “flower” design but I wouldn’t get the wife a dozen of these as a gift.

After reading some of the details on their site I found out that the Zalman 9500 carries the CNPS (Computer Noise Prevention System ) label which is given to all their components that are meant for noiseless computers. The box claims temperatures will show an average of a 10C improvement over a stock heatsink, but when a company makes claims about performance, I usually assume that is under ideal conditions. Hopefully this should provide enough cooling if I wanted to overclock while still running underneath my desk.

Lets look and see what you get with it.