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Review: Zalman Reserator 1

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 1 June 2004, 00:00

Tags: Zalman (090120.KQ)

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Introduction

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Zalman's application to live in Laalaaville was accepted then. The Korean company's previous cooling products have long bordered on the slightly insane. Take for example their heatsinks the size of saucers that completely violate the socket specs lovingly crafted by Intel and AMD. However recent output has pushed that slight insanity well into full-on asylum-style crazy.

With silence a long held goal of theirs and their air coolers struggling to get much bigger without causing serious fitment problems, they've had to adjust their thinking. Their TNN500A chassis is one product of that thinking, today's review focus is the other. If they're indications of products to come, I shudder to think about what's next.

Their first foray into water cooling, the Reserator 1 kit with accompanying ZM-WB2 Gold waterblock seeks to redefine the meaning of silent, as far as CPU cooling goes at least. As the name suggests, the Reserator is a radiator and reservoir combined, along with integrated pump, packing everything you need bar waterblocks into one integrated package.

Completely fanless, logic dictates that without something to move air over the radiator, the radiator must be quite large and the water volume must be vast, for it to work effectively. How right that logic is, let's take a closer look.