Zalman as a company were founded wayyyyy back in 1999, but it wasnt until the release of the CNPS-3100 and consequently the CNPS-6000, dubbed by UK distributor Quiet PC, the Flower Cooler, in December 2001 that they came to be recognised as a company to watch as far as forward thinking design features go. The Flower design was unlike anything we had seen before with its semi-circle of copper fins clamped at the base, cooled by a fan attached to a PCI bracket, and was a complete departure from the screaming HS&F combinations of the time.
The second flower incarnation, the Super Flower, was introduced in February 2003 and developed on the original design by completing the circle of copper and adding a fan to the actual heat-sink, removing the need for the PCI bracket. The Super Flower was incredibly elegant and when used in conjunction with the bundled fan-mate speed controller, was nigh-on silent. I still have one fitted in a custom built machine I made a few years back which is so quiet, I now use it as my office PC. A larger 120mm fan version, the CNPS-7700, was released in October of 2004.

In June 2005 came the Aero Flower Cooler, or CNPS-9500, which flipped the cooler on its side and added heat-pipes to further improve the heat sink’s efficiency. Zalman then got bitten by the Fatal1ty bug and released a cooler which was a slight departure from its usual fare in as much as it put performance over and above everything else. Based on a similar design to the Super Flower, the Fatal1ty FS-C77 cooler sports a 120mm fan which runs at much higher speed than Zalman usually allow, creating a fair amount of noise but a great amount of cooling.

October 2006 saw the launch of the CNPS-9700 which was basically a bigger version of the 9500 utilising a larger, 110mm fan which was governed via the Fan-Mate 2 speed controller. Finally, November 06 saw Zalman release the CNPS-9700 NT which shares the design of the vanilla 9700 but is nickel plated and is capable of utilising the Nforce chipset’s ability to adjust fan speed dynamically.

So thats where we are today, taking a look at Zalmans latest and hopefully greatest air cooled heat sink assembly, the CNPS-9700 NT.