Zalman LQ Series Ultimate Liquid CPU Coolers

I bought this to replace my Artic Freezer Pro 13 which I was very happy with, it cooled well and was quiet but took up a massive chunk of my case and didn’t look that good through the side window. I thought as long as the Zalman wasn’t too noisy and cooled as good, then I would be happy. Anyway the build quality of this cooler is very good and seems well made. The pipes are very flexible and seem to be very tightly attached at each end.

Fitting is easy as long as you spend a few minutes studying the instructions to make sure you are using the correct screws for your set up. (I had a slight issue with a screw and bracket but full marks to Quiet PC who sorted it out straight away, customer service the way it’s meant to be :)….). Once installed the cooler looks the part with the top of the pump lighting up in blue.

If I remove the side of my case and put my ear up against the open side of the pc I can barely hear the pump, it is almost silent. The pump volume doesn’t alter regardless of how hot the cpu gets. The fan noise is about the same as my Arctic Freezer 13 fan which I always regarded as being quiet. The Zalman fan spins at about 950rpm under normal use and when pushed it rises to 1700 rpm where the noise level rises but not to a ridiculous level. I tested the cooler’s performance last night and here are the figures, My cpu is an i7 2600k and I have it overclocked to 4.4Ghz, the ambient temperature was 23.8c. At idle it hovered around 33c. Two hours of Battlefield 3 the highest temperature reached was 58c. 1 and a half hours of prime 95 running the cpu at 100% and the cpu would not go any higher than 66C. At idle the Zalman is about 2-3 degrees better than my arctic freezer 13 but putting the cpu under load with prime 95 the Zalman is a massive 20c cooler than my Arctic freezer 13. The Zalman LQ315 as far as i’m concerned is a great cooler, it looks good, takes up little room in my case and performs far better than I was expecting.