Introduction

Zalman has been around the block once or twice when it comes to CPU cooling or cooling anything in a computer. They have come a long way since the days when I was using the CNPS9500 to cool my AMD Opteron 170 CPU and the old VF700-CU on my ATI Radeon X850 XTPE. Exemplifying this is the newest entry to air cooling your CPUs with their latest entry to the market and it is a dual tower cooler as well. Following suit with the trend for silence in desktop computing, this dual tower comes equipped with a single 135mm fan to tend to the airflow, while hopefully keeping the cooler Ultra Quiet as its name suggests.

Just recently looking at the be quiet Dark Rock Pro 2, which was almost dead silent, as well as knowing that Noctua, Phanteks, Thermalright and all the others are capable of, Zalman has their hands full making a big name for themselves in a dual tower design.I already know that most of you are groaning at your monitor, asking yourself, how is a single 135mm fan geared for silence going to be able to handle the heat load of today's high-end CPU's? Well, Zalman makes the cooler with the potential to have three fans in a push/pull/pull fan configuration. While it is going to cost you some additional funds to get the extra pair of fans, the clips do come with the cooler in the hardware kit. So, with this sample to hit my desk, you have the choice of a ton of surface area and a single silent fan to keep temperatures manageable, or add another pair, lose a bit of the silent factor and keep temperatures under control.

The best thing about the Zalman CNPS14X that we are shortly going to get a really close look at is that Zalman boxed a pair of 135mm ZM-F4 fans so that I can not only see how this unit performs out of the box with the single fan, but I will also be testing with the triple fan configuration to see just how well this stands up to the likes of the Silver Arrow or the Noctua/Phanteks solutions.

That being said, let's see what this stylized monster cooler from Zalman is all about and dig right into the CNPS14X Ultra Quiet CPU cooler.