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2[H]4U
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2003
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So I bought a new Zalman Flower CNPS7000B-Cu heatsink the other week for a 2nd PC and when I opened it, I noticed the base was really bad. I'm not talking 'not well polished' here, I'm talking it was warped and crooked:
You can see that where all the copper fin sheets have been squeezed together, some in the middle must have become mis-aligned and are causing a warped base. These pictures don't show it but there's actually a twist in the middle of the base. Imagine holding 2 books together edge to edge and then twisting them both around an imaginery axis that goes through them both:
Here's another pic after I started sanding it down:
You can see how bad the finish is. If I mounted it in the condition it arrived, I might have done damage to my CPU. Well, I didn't have time for an RMA so I just decided to carry on lapping it. It took a good hour and a half to finally grind it down to the lowest groove and thus be flat, but I did it:
Deliberately not mirror finish, but flat. I installed it and it worked perfectly. Well, it is a good heatsink.
So yeah, just wanted to share that. I could have returned it no problems I'm sure, but I just couldn't be bothered to have to wait for the slow RMA process. This is probably an isolated case, but I've never been impressed by Zalman's base finishes. The base on a northbridge cooler I bought was pretty rough. And this one, though very smooth and polished to almost a mirror, was absurdly warped.
You can see that where all the copper fin sheets have been squeezed together, some in the middle must have become mis-aligned and are causing a warped base. These pictures don't show it but there's actually a twist in the middle of the base. Imagine holding 2 books together edge to edge and then twisting them both around an imaginery axis that goes through them both:
Here's another pic after I started sanding it down:
You can see how bad the finish is. If I mounted it in the condition it arrived, I might have done damage to my CPU. Well, I didn't have time for an RMA so I just decided to carry on lapping it. It took a good hour and a half to finally grind it down to the lowest groove and thus be flat, but I did it:
Deliberately not mirror finish, but flat. I installed it and it worked perfectly. Well, it is a good heatsink.
So yeah, just wanted to share that. I could have returned it no problems I'm sure, but I just couldn't be bothered to have to wait for the slow RMA process. This is probably an isolated case, but I've never been impressed by Zalman's base finishes. The base on a northbridge cooler I bought was pretty rough. And this one, though very smooth and polished to almost a mirror, was absurdly warped.