Zalman is a well known name in cooling that was founded in 1999 and immediately began patenting their innovative products. They are committed to creating a “user friendly” environment by reducing computer noise through their cooling products, and one of their latest offerings is definitely designed to do just that. The Zalman Reserator 1 Plus is a fanless water cooling system, and in this review we will be testing it on a very heat intensive SLI system. Let’s see how it fared.
First Impression:
A very large box arrived at my door at 9pm one Wednesday evening via FedEx. I couldn’t believe there was a water cooler inside a box this large. It was a brown cardboard box with the letters ZALMAN written on the side. Inside the dreary outside box was a second box, this one much more lively and colorful then the first. It was rather difficult pulling the inside box out from the first, it actually took my wife to pull the outside box down while I tried desperately to hold onto the inner one. The image below shows the shiny inner package with absolutely no visible damage from shipping.
Inside the package there were three layers of Styrofoam separating the neatly organized contents of the cooling system. The first layer consisted of a very long blue rubber hose, 4 meters long actually. Since this cooler was going to be installed on an SLI system the people at Zalman were nice enough to throw in an extra VGA cooler for the sake of review. Shown in the image below is the tubing along with the extra VGA cooler and the users’ manual.
Layer two included many more goodies. As you can see from the image below we have the CPU block, another VGA block, some anti corrosion coolant additive, a flow indicator and a few smaller parts.
The last layer of Styrofoam revealed an astoundingly large cooling chamber, or what Zalman likes to call the “Reserator”. From the image below it is rather difficult to see just how large this thing really is, the dimensions printed on the lid show it to be 150mm(W) x 150mm(L) x 500mm(H) and weighing in at 6.5kg. That is 14.3lbs of anodized aluminum! This 2.5L container also shows on the lid that it has over 1.2 square meters of radiation area.
