Installation:

Installation of the Zalman CNPS10X Performa was fairly straight forward. First, you'll need to loosen the four mounting screws on the bottom of the heatsink, slide in the appropriate bracket for your socket type, and tighten. Next, you'll position the mounting pins in to the appropriate holes on the universal mounting bracket and secure them with the included clips. This is especially important as the holes for the socket LGA 1156 and 775 are very close to each other and could shift during mounting, making it difficult to get the unit mounted properly. Depending on which socket you are using, you may need to apply either the universal mounting bracket adapter or a spacer pad. The User's Guide does a good job of explaining it - so just follow along and you shouldn't have any issues.



Next, you'll attach the heatsink to the mounting bracket with four included screws in the typical 1-3-2-4 star-formation and tighten everything up. Then you'll grab, if you so choose, the anti-vibration strips and apply them to the heatsink fins and secure the fan using the included clips. To be honest, I chose not to use the tape and I didn't notice any extraneous noise from vibration, or any fan slippage.

To test for fit, we mounted the cooler with the following hardware into a Cooler Master Gladiator 600 mid-tower case (as seen in the photograph below).

» Intel Core i7 920 (2.66GHz) processor
» MSI x58M uATX motherboard
» HIS Radeon HD 4650 512MB PCIe video card
» Seagate 500GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» OCZ Technology Platinum PC12600 1600MHz DDR3 triple channel memory
» CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 750 power supply
» Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit operating system



Testing:

The test system is run on an open bench in a room with an ambient temperature of 28 degrees Celsius. CPUID’s Hardware Monitor 1.15 was used for measuring the idle and load temperatures. Idle conditions were established with a 30 minute period where only Hardware Monitor was running. For load conditions, a combination of Prime 95 (with 8 instances running), SiSoft Sandra Professional’s Burn-In Test, and FutureMark 3DMark Vantage were run for 30 minutes. All readings were noted and the average of the four core readings were charted. No additional fans are used in this setup.

For comparison purposes, the following coolers were run through the same set of tests:

» Stock Intel cooler
» Thermaltake V1 AX (running on high)
» Prolimatech Megahalems

We also wanted to test the Performa in a two fan configuration, so we paired the stock Zalman fan with the Scythe fan used for the Prolimatech Megahalems.