ZALMAN CNPS9900ALED 120mm 2 Ball Low-noise Blue LED CPU Cooler

Pros: Nice Design
Easy Set Up

Cons: Gets Dusty
Can easily bend or Dink copper blade if not gentle

Pros: Out standing cooling, quite, never had a problem with the ones I've owned.

Cons: Large, delicate, insane mounting.

Really, the mounting gave me the strong feeling that a team of geniuses spent millions over an extended period of time trying and succeeding in coming up with the most asinine mounting possible. Seriously poor. The instruction booklet was either written by someone who speaks English as a second language or should be given a broom to sweep floors and never touch a technical manual again. It was nearly useless. The diagrams and instructions were poor. The ridiculous double stick tape plasitc bracket would not work no matter which way I positioned it (there are really only four choices discounting rotating it). There was absolutely no way to include it and get the back plate to sit flush against the mother board. My thinking is that if you carefully followed the instruction manual, you could ruin your mother board. Maybe its different for an Intel build, mine is AMD based. I tossed it in the bin and all is well. FYI, I was building radios from scratch at 9 years old, as well as having been a tool and die maker. In addition I ran a computer repair shop and have built well over 100 custom machines.

Every iteration of this fan seems to get stupider in terms of how it is mounted. In addion to having to get creative on how to actually mount it, you have to be extra careful not to touch the copper fins: They bend like sticking your finger in warm butter, no fooling. The bizzar mounting makes sure you get lots of extra time and tries to do so.

All this is before you consider getting proper tension of the mounts to insure optimum heat transfer. The feed back you get with the screws is very vague. If you use the wrong screws you could crack your CPU.

Other Thoughts: I have three of these in machines I'm running now. They do a very good job but are overkill for most people most of the time. Have to knock off a star because the mounting is that bad, even if I'm the type that thinks perfromance is everything.

I got this version in with no damage to it or my system by being extremely careful. Even if, there has got to be about a 70% chance or so of doing some damage to your motherboard or the fan itself with the way it mounts. Again this build was an AMD so maybe Intels are different.

If you are new to computer building you might want to skip this one. Wait until you get a few builds under your belt so that you know what really is needed with respect to a CPU cooling fan.

Pros: Looks great and keeps the temps real low under load

Cons: My thermal paste was dried out luckily I had some but wish I could of tried out the paste that came with

Other Thoughts: I read the reviews and knew this would be hard to put on so I'm not deducting an egg for that but the dried out thermal paste sucks

Pros: this thing can hang with a budget water cooler (corsair H60) . Since I have both I decided to compare it. on a AMD FX 8150 the temp read is within a couple of degrees. This cost me $10 after rebate and the H60 cost me $80, you do the math.

Cons: have to remove the motherboard to install since the AMD clip and lever was not included.

Other Thoughts: I love this air cooler enough that I use it now insteadof the water cooler. Zalman have a good rebate going right now and it look really cool in my case.

Pros: Very large copper heat sink with lots of surface area with a fan in between both coils to siphon away any heat coming off the CPU chip keeps things very cool. Very quiet, the noise is barely noticeable without the optional resistor for the CPU fan connection, but I'd imagine that would've made everything even less noticeable.

Huge improvement over the stock CPU fan that came with my PC which would have this horrible noise coming out of the PC very often, which was the reason to replace it ASAP. Running the PC for several hours and the case temp still barely feels any different from before I turned on the PC.

Cons: Installation was quite the task, but then again, removing everything out to take the entire motherboard out of the case definitely helped. I recall having installed this fan on another AMD PC a few years ago and it was also quite a bit of a task as well, but once it was installed, everything was fine.

Other Thoughts: Looking at the details section for the dimensions, it was hard to estimate if it'd fit inside the case, but it fits just fine. If you have a fan on the side near the CPU though, then it won't fit, but then again, it does have quite the clearance from the memory sticks so it might be something to consider when deciding on which fan to use.

Keeping my 8 core AMD chip cool as a cucumber 6+ hours after installation and powering on without any noticeable problems thus far is worth 5 eggs.

Pros: This has cooled three processors for me... First an i7-920, second a i7-960 and currently on my dad's i3. None were OC'd. It's dead silent.

Cons: Mounting it can be a pain. I didn't need three people, but I have managed a few scraped knuckles.

Pros: the zalman is easy to install and comes with attachments for the different size chipsets. once installed i noticed a consiterable change from my old heat sink. it was one of the square ones with a fan. this cooled about 3-5degrees cooler idle and under load. this heat sink gets close to 10 degreese cooler than the factory intel heatsink.

Cons: hard to clean. since all the fins are close and rather sharp you should get a "throw away" tooth brush to use as a duster. it is also because there is not much space to clean between the fan and where the dust builds up.

Pros: Cools my FX-8350 just fine. This is my second one and I use it on a crosshair V Formula Z

Cons: Trying to attach this thing was a royal pain in the rear. The previous generation attachment was great and easy to use. The new attachment has you screwing the cooler to the mother board. It took three of us to get it installed and I though we cracked the motherboard. Even though it performs well it was misery (so I had company) to put it on

Pros: Works great!

Cons: A pain to install with just one person.

Pros: Has been cooling a i7 920 for three years now. Nice icy cold temps even with mild overclocking. Has a blue led that is pleasing to look at when i take my case cover off every 6 months or so. Tall enough to not interfere with ram sticks.

Cons: PITA to clean after years of use, but i don't imagine that any air cooler would be easy to clean.

Other Thoughts: Keeps temps down even when clogged with dust.