Installed

Zalman CNPS 9900 MAX falls into the category of very large coolers, the ones designed to give you significant overclocking headroom while being trouble-free air-coolers. When installed, the CNPS 9900 MAX dwarfs every other component on the motherboard. While it's tall, it should fit in most PC cases that aren't slim.


With the fan neatly tucked away at the center, the VRM area has plenty of breathing space. You can even change the VRM heatsinks, and it won't affect the cooler.


The GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 is a very crowded motherboard, its designers made lavish use of heatsinks to keep key components cool. I was very skeptical at the start about northbridge heatsink clearance and clearance with the detachable Hybrid Pipe heatsink, but the CNPS 9900 MAX offers more than enough room for both.


This is the key area where clearance is king. A badly designed cooler would deprive you of a memory slot, thereby making two other slots on the LGA1366 motherboard useless (if you want to properly populate every memory slot and retain a stable triple-channel configuration). This is where Zalman's design shines bright. With no fan to latch on to at the end, there's all the world's clearance with the memory area. Feel free to populate every slot, add and remove modules with the CPU cooler installed, as well as make use of tall modules with fancy heatsinks and even memory coolers added to the mix.