Going from a Antec Kuhler 620 to Zalman CNPS9900MAX

Summer arrived. Kuhler 620 couldn’t cut it with fans running low. Running the fan at 3000RPM all the time, or even when gaming, was not an option. So I had to look for a new cooler, an air cooler to be precise, because they could cool pretty much same as a AIO water cooler, while screaming much less.

Note: I did say I won’t add anything new to this PC, but mother nature had other plans! I cannot help that, right?

One problem though. The best in the class air coolers could not fit. There was the limitation of clearance inside the case, but more importantly, the dreaded Corsair Vengeance RAM made it impossible for any cooler to clear their height. So I had to look for something that did not protrude  into the RAM slots.

There are very little options. I found the Zalman CNPS9900 MAX, not only did exactly THAT and also performed better than the Kuhler 620!!! Victory!

Antec Kuhler 620 performance with different fans

Hey news flash! I am not happy with the cooling performance of my CPU cooler. But you all know, I’m never happy with anything, but that’s me. Some people are hard to satisfy. (That can be bad for both parties though)

Anyways, I tried many fans to get better cooling performance out of this radiator. There is no going back for me. I’m stuck with water cooling. A quality air cooler performs much better than these clumsy closed-loop water coolers for the same price (or even less) but they are very big.

Intel Sandybridge, here I come (Core i7 2600K, ASRock Z68 Extreme4)

After a lot of thought, I went ahead with the Sandybridge upgrade. If you know me, you should know that I am always looking for the sweet spot when it comes to performance for the $$$. This time, things have changed.

Why did I have to upgrade?

Well, I didn’t have to, but there were few issues with my old PC.

• It wouldn’t POST some times. It had warm boot problems.
• I couldn’t add a second graphics card, if I wanted to, because the SATA ports would be right underneath the second card, rendering 4 out of 6 ports unusable. Of course I might not add one right now, because there is no real need at the moment. But definitely when BF3 comes out. Maybe I would buy two GTX560’s or 570’s.
• I was doing a lot of video encoding stuff. A faster CPU would benefit.
• And most importantly, fun! And we got our mid-year bonus + I made about 40k in the last couple of months from overtime work.
• Besides, I could sell my old stuff off, so that I can make some of what I spent, back.

So what did I upgrade to?

• CPU: The top of the line Sandybridge Core i7 2600K. I bought this off second hand, for about $40 less.
• Motherboard: Brand new ASRock Z68 Extreme4
• Cooler: Antec Kuhler 620

Let’s see why I chose each of them.