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Zalman Reserator 1 Plus

High-end Passive CPU & VGA Water-cooling

Zalman, my friends, have a long and rather sky-scraping reputation when it comes to cooling techniques versus noise. Well, the lack of noise to be more precise, or as one of my editors would say, they make 'inaudible products.' The production of noiseless cooling solutions is predominantly why Zalman has become so successful, because hey, PC's are darn noisy these days. We all want to get rid of two things - heat and noise, two annoyances that contradict one another.

So we can immediately establish that heat is the most important cause of noise. PC's these days are getting hot and thus we add active fans to cool it down. If you have a new model Pentium 4 processor based on the Prescott core, you pretty much have a heat issue instantly. I have two of these what I like to call 'furnaces' here in the lab and once activated you can honestly fry an egg on them. Seriously. If we look at thermal development over the past couple of years we can see that there is a direct relation between faster and thus hotter products that need hefty fan/heatink combo's and basically a lot of extra cooling in the form of fans in that PC of yours. I've seen modern day PC's with seven fans in them! SEVEN! I swear, add one more fan and the thing should be able to hover. This is a progressively increasing trend and an issue for me personally as all that heat needs to be removed, often by fans and thus that creates a lot of noise.
A while ago I was at the house of an acquaintance. The minute I stepped into his house I could hear his PC. My little story above with the seven fans really is not that uncommon anymore. Your average PC these days has 5-6 fans at the very least. That much you ask? No way? Yes way. A PSU fan, CPU fan, Northbridge fan (mainboard chipset), graphics card fan, PC-Casing fan below PSU and often a HD fan (intake). Open up your case and have a look.

Another big issue is that heat is often only circulated inside of the PC. The fan blows away the heat yet makes the ambient temperature of your PC and thus other components warmer. So you need to find a method that can absorb heat or simply exhaust it from the PC, and that's of course where today's product comes in. Water-cooling is one of the best techniques available to draw heat from the warm components and move that heat outside the PC, yet most solutions still have large fans that blow air over the radiator, so we still experience noise.

Zalman last year released their Reserator 1, a passive cooled water-cooling kit. Recently they released the Reserator 1 Plus package, pretty much the same stuff, yet with newly designed water blocks to remove more heat from that precious gear of ours. Passively cooled, you ask? Yeah, no fans are involved at all. No fans people. That means no noise! Yay! The Zalman Reserator 1 Plus is a fanless water cooling system.
Initially I was skeptical about the design concept as Zalman claim it can not only cool down for example a CPU, but they also claim it can cool down the Northbridge and graphics card as well. All that passively ?? I'll cheerfully test that for you.

What we are going to do today my friends is magic, as we will not go easy on Zalmans Reserator 1 Plus at all! Oh no, we are going to cool down one of the most popular high-end graphics cards, the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT and a high-end CPU, the Athlon FX-57, passively! That means no fans and no noise, only water flowing around with the help of a water pump that you simply cannot hear. It almost sounds like an authentic illusion from David Copperfield huh? Can it be done? Let's find out. Zalman, bring on that magic!
 

I just know for sure I saw the Zalman Reserator 1 Plus in a movie a while ago. (Ed: I applaud your creativity Hilbert :P)