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Sorry Clue69Less, but one only has to Google Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro for a plethora of reviews that will back up anything I've said in this post regarding the 9500 and AC Freezer Series. I'm sorry if your results weren't satisfactory.

Right now you can get the Freezer 64 for about $35 shipped, from Newegg. Heatsinkfactory.com sells them for much less than that, when they're in stock. All three Zalman 9500s are running over $50 shipped on Newegg or Heatsinkfactory. At the very least, most reviews put the Freezer 64 on par with the Zalman 9500 when you compare results, so it comes down to price which makes the Freezers the clear leader. You got good pricing on those 9500s you bought, but like I noted earlier it isn't the norm. However, at the prices you noted the Zalman is a viable alternative.

I don't doubt the performance of the 9500s. They are simply priced too high against comparable products.

Sorry Clue69Less, but one only has to Google Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro for a plethora of reviews that will back up anything I've said in this post regarding the 9500 and AC Freezer Series. I'm sorry if your results weren't satisfactory.

I've seen the reviews and that's why I included three ACs in my comparison. I got an Alpine 64 for something like $8 on a closeout sale just to use as an inexpensive baseline. Then I picked up a Freezer 64 Pro and Freezer 7 Pro for $35 shipped each. The 64 Pro had a noisy fan so I sent it back and got an even noisier one. Go figure. In my synthetic and real CPU tests, the Pros were typically a couple of degrees hotter than the 9500, so they are even farther behind the 9700, Tuniq and Ultra 120. No doubt in bang per buck, the Pros are great deals but therein is the rub and it's all about perspective. All of my rigs cost in the range of $1500 to $3K. The $10 saved in going with a AC Pro is totally lost in the noise. That's one reason why I recommend the Thermalright- you can put an ultra-quiet fan on it and get very good cooling or put a higher flow (but still reasonably quiet) fan on it and get great performance. All for what to me is an insignificant additional cost in the big picture. The Zalman 9700 at the price I paid is an excellent compromise because it is very close to the Ultra 120 coupled to a fast fan for an overclocked rig. But with the fan on slow, the 9700 is very quiet. It even works pretty well with the fan disconnected and I think is very good value at the current Newegg price. But it's not my favorite.

It's not trivial to test HSFs on actual PCs because you spend a fair bit of time installing and uninstalling. Also, unless you have a temperature and humidity controlled chamber, relatively small changes in ambient conditions can swamp the differences between units. That's why I built my synthetic rig. It has incoming air that is heated against cooling. So air-conditioned air is pumped into a high quality heat exchanger that has large surface area and mass. On a good day, I can regulate my incoming air to within ~1C over an 8 hour period. That's extremely important when comparing load temps on actual PCs. What I've been doing is varying the heat load to the pseudo-CPU block on one axis of a 3-D plot, then varying the incoming air temp on another axis. I can plot those against the average heater current in the CPU heater block and this gives quite a bit of info about how a HSF exchanges heat over a wide range of loads as a function of incoming air temps.

I have not run the Freezer Pros since upgrading the synthetic rig. With the old setup, they did very well at low to medium heat loads but fell behind in more difficult load tests. Still, the bang per buck champ, no doubt about it. Right now, I'm saving my pennies to get more copper to machine into heater blocks so I can have more than one HSF mounted at a time. The problem there is that each block has to be calibrated, yada, yada.

Alright.

This is a verry opinoiated post!
I personaly have the Zalmain 9700 on my e6600 @ 3.3GHz.
With the fan set at minimum I am at 56C (vs 53C fan at max) and the system runs almost silent.

I would be intrested to know how the cooling vs noise is from some of the other coolers.

How the cooler looks isin't as important as how it workes to me, but the 9700 does look pretty nice.
If it performs similary to the other coolers, I don't mind spending an extra $20 or so on it.

It really does look nice through my window, though



Also, sorry I can't spell worth a shat

Hey, I did a mod for a guy that hauls his rig around to Lan parties often, plus he takes it to gigs to record music. He has a Mine which is big and heavy and was having troubles with it losing the thermal grease seal. Note that he's not really the gentle type and that's probably part of the problem as I've hauled PCs around without problems. Anyway, I attached four springs to the top of his Mine, then tensioned them to spots on his case and they act like a shock absorber and limit the damage due to driving his rig around town. It's too early to tell how well it will work long term, but looks good so far. I just drilled small holes in the top HS fin and in the case and the springs form a radial "X". You'd need something different if you had problems with a 9700 since it has no flat top fin - plus the 9700 fins are wimpy.

That's what I'm saying, not saying the cooler is sh$t, just that it is too expensive for the performance.

IIRC the Alpines were never stellar performers. I believe they were just meant to replace the OEM heatsink and not for serious overclocking. They were a decent setup on the cheap, but I think you knew that already.

Indeed it would appear that you had a run of bad luck with the Freezers because mine is very quiet. Even so, something that is only a few degrees cooler in your tests, yet costs almost half as much on average still makes me recommend a Freezer before the 9500. It's why I try to include the caveat of grabbing the Zalmans when they're on sale at lower prices.

The Freezers cannot keep up with the 9700, but they weren't meant too. They were designed to keep up with the more popular 92mm fan coolers at the time, as was the 9500.

I agree with you on Thermalright. I've owned several of their heatsink's and find them to be a rock solid and quality product. The ability to pick your fan can be a plus or minus depending on the person. I see it as a plus.

I remember a post a while back where you were discussing your synthetic testing setup. Please do keep us posted on your results. It'd be nice to have a sticky here with some quality results on coolers that you could update as you acquire different coolers. Similar to Cleeve's GPU list.

Hey I got my 9700 for $45 delivered from a major etailer (Newegg). That's cheap. You gotta keep your eyes open - I see Zalman's on sale cheap 3 or 4 times a year. I've never seen a sale like that on a Tuniq or Thermalright. If you do, let me know.

Will do. I have a problem of making it most of the way through a comparison, then realizing there is a dire need for another system mod. Then back to square one. A friend says I'm infected with Piddleitis. Lately I'm trying to automate more aspects so it can run loops unattended 24/7.

Yes you do see them on sale quite a bit, but still, look at the link I had posted a little while ago, its an older review, and it doesn't show many recent coolers, but it shows the older thermalright xp 120 (maybe it was the ultra 120) beating the zalman by a clean 4*C and with less dba too. They are the same price, and the tuniq and scythe's outperform the thermalrights unless you add some crazy 100cfm fans.

I don't remember which review that was but I probably read it. Was that the 9700 vs. the 120? Because I'm seeing those two vie for the lead depending on conditions. The thing is, you can swap fans around on the Thermalright and pick your poison. It's not so easy to swap fans on the Zalman and I think of that as its major weakness. Note that I only have a sample size of one unit on the 9700 so maybe I got a really good one but it doesn't give up much at all to the 120 or the Tuniq in my tests. At some heat loads, it's the best I've seen.

I know you kinda said you don't care about looks, but this is my point about the zalman's. 53*C is way too high for my tastes, especially if that's idle, I'd lower the oc if I were you. And also, this what I have been trying to say all along, zalman makes a quality product, but they go after looks more than performance and sell them at a very high price. They do perform nice, but not if you want a serious oc, as I have seen way above 3.3ghz on 6600's that are prime95 stable. One person has remained anonymous, but I know that he can runs prime on his 6600 at 4ghz stably with not dangerous temps. So what I am saying is that there are better coolers for the price, not the cooler is absolutely horrible. Geez guys, aly off a bit, I have given you some proof, and I have agreed with you guys that it is a good cooler, just not worth $50-$70 bucks when there are coolers that are only $40-$60 that are just as good.

That may be true, but considering they have to put it on sale consonstantly means that it was way too overpriced in the first place.

The fan is a major weakness, I will completely give that a valid excuse for its performance, because if zalman could make a 140mm version of that without too much weight and a better airflow fan (though 140mm fans don't require much speed=silence ) with a reasonable price tag such as $60, that's $60 I'd gladly put down for a cooler. Even if they charged $50 for a 120mm version with at least a better fan that has more fins, then it would be worth the price

The fan on the 120 might have been better, but if you look at the review, the fan also only had 50dba, while the zalman at full speed has 4* more and something like 54dba, not much of a difference, but you can't say slince to performance here, as the thermalright beats the zalman in both

I see that you know what you're doing, and you also are a respectful person, I have dealt with many Jack***es lately and its nice to debate instead of argue, and so I respect you for that, but I just don't see any reason for the 9700 at the current performance it has.

We got you already man

You have way too high temps...

Read my second to last post, discusses those temps.

See my reasons now?

And no, I still think the zalman is worth $40, just that it is a quality made cooler, that doesn't not mean its worth the price or the performance.

That's debatable. It could just mean that it has a large markup so little shops can gouge unsuspecting Blingaholics.

I'm shopping dB meters now. I've got a pretty decent one now but I want to get one that has a lower noise floor. I used to use a device that does an FFT analysis of sound and if any of you has one of those laying around unused, I'll make sure the pots don't get all corroded, just to help maintain your gear, of course. I kinda like how SilentPC Review has audio files you can listen to but even that isn't what you really need to best understand a noise source. Noise analysis and abatement is not a simple science.