Up until recently I hadn't looked at aircoolers for a few years. To be honest if you're running an AMD Athlon 64 system, aftermarket Heatsinks don't really decrease noise or increase performance - unless your overclocking. Athlon processors run cool enough with stock cooling for the most part, however there are a lot of toasty Intel processors out there as well as the rise of Dual Core AMD processors. Today we are looking at how well the Zalman CNPS9500 LED can cool a 3800+ Dual Core processor from AMD, and then we'll take it up a notch to 4600+ speeds and see how well it works with a 400MHz per core overclock (800MHz of extra processing heat). Things are bound to be interesting so keep on reading.

I contacted Zalman a few weeks ago and they were happy to send me the Zalman CNPS9500 LED cooler to test out on our Dual Core setup, and seemed quite confident that it could keep up to other heatsinks from Asetek and Thermaltake. That's pretty bold of them considering Zalman hasn't been in the performance cooling market much. Traditionally Zalman's focus had been on silence not killer performance. With the CNPS9500 LED they went with a different design and use some nifty heatpipe configurations in this unit. Will it have what it takes?