The Verdict

It is rare that I am impressed by a CPU cooler. With the 10X series CPU coolers Zalman however achieved exactly that. There's really very little negative to report on the 10X series other than a minor inconvenience during installation. Once you have one of these puppies up and running properly you'll have a smile on your face.

CNPS 10X Quiet
Zalman's CNPS 10X Quiet product won't be the cheapest on the block but with the 10X Quiet there's one thing a certain fact, keep that fan controller at low RPM and you'll have really good cooling performance, at little to no noise whatsoever. The overall design is sturdy and the fan itself is not rather bulky -- in fact it looks pretty good as well. For roughly 50 EUR you'll be able to purchase it and we think that's money well invested. If you are not a complete cooling and overclocking freak we'd very much like to recommend this product.

CNPS 10X Extreme
For the somewhat more enthusiast PC aficionado if you throw in another tenner you can purchase the CNPS 10X Extreme at roughly 60 EUR. There's no doubt that this is to be considered a somewhat 'spicy' price tag for a CPU cooler, but the fact is that this is a seriously good cooler. The overall performance is grand and the embedded fan controller is just downright handy as you can adjust fan speed on the fly. At the lowest setting you'll have a noiseless performing cooler with cooling performance rated very high, at the same levels as the 10X Quiet really. From there on upwards depending on how much noise you are willing to allow, the performance can go upwards. We overclocked our processor by 800 MHz and injected 1.3 Volts into the CPU core to make sure it's nice and hot. With this cooler in it's extreme settings (which granted is too noisy for my taste) the temperature remained steady at 45 Degrees C with four Prime96 threads completely trashing the processor for several runs. Now for air based cooling that's just a remarkable achievement.

With the 10X series coolers Zalman brings a very decent performing cooler series to the market that aesthetically wise look very nice, performance wise are top notch and thanks to the fan controllers offer flexibility. Surely they will be more expensive then your average heatpipe based coolers, but then again .. these coolers are not average.

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Whichever one you pick, you'll like the cooler for what it brings to the table, and as such both the CNPS 10X Extreme and Quiet are very much recommended by Guru3D.com