 Today I'll be unboxing the CNPS 11X Extreme. This is an ultimate extreme performance CPU cooling cooler called the CNPS 11X. On the back we find some information which is pretty typical. Alright, powerful cooling performance, Q max of up to 350 watts, V-shaped dual heatsink design for optimal airflow, composite heat pipe heat transfer capacity, enhanced 1.5x. Okay, we have composite heat pipes which means that they are not a typical axial groove. They are not a typical sintered metal type, but they actually use axial grooves and sintered metal in order to speed up the flow of the liquid. And yes, it is a liquid or a vapor or whatever the phase that it happens to be in that is inside the heat pipe. So let's explain how heat pipes work real quick. I actually saw a hilarious hardware mod that someone did where they cut off the top of their heat pipes on their cooler so that their side panel would fit. So they took their cooler and they just cut off all the tops of the heat pipes and they were like, Oh my cooler is so bad, my CPU overheats, oh that's terrible. Yes, that would happen. And the reason for that is that heat pipes on the inside have a little bit of liquid. Sometimes it's water, sometimes it's something else depending on what kind of heat pipes we're talking about. And what that liquid does is it goes down to the CPU where it becomes a liquid. Then the CPU, because it's hot, inside the CPU heat pipe it's low pressure, right? So the boiling point is much lower. So it gets hot even at 40 degrees, 50 degrees, it boils, it evaporates, and then the vapor flows up to the top of the heat pipe where it's cool, it gets cooled by the fan and the fins that it's attached and all that good stuff, and then turns back into a liquid and runs back down to the CPU. Well then how does a heat pipe work if it's not right side up like this? Well that is what the axial grooves and the centered metal are for. They cause the liquid to make its way back down to the CPU no matter what. So there, you learned something today if you didn't know how a heat pipe works. You also learned that it's not a good idea to cut them because then they won't, they'll perform about as well as a tube of copper, which doesn't perform very well for carrying large amounts of heat. Ooh, that looks nice. I've always loved the look of Zollmann heat sinks, although I've done almost nothing in terms of Zollmann unboxings on my YouTube channel here. So why don't we do accessories first, where we will find lots of, lots of little parts of stuff, oh wow. Okay, so sockets, it's going to be compatible with all the latest sockets, including 1155, 1156, 1366, 775, AM2, AM2+, and AM3. Okay, so this looks like Intel, this looks like probably AMD, no this looks like Intel, I don't know what it looks like. Basically you got one of these, you got some thermal grease, you got one of these, you got a sticker, you got some pads, and some, okay, you got a four-pin PWM fan connector adapter to make your four-pin PWM fan quieter, see it's just got a little inline resistor, which is awesome, I love those. I have a little collection of them at home, you got some of those, some of those. Okay, you got some backplates, well you got one backplate, I'm going to do this. Ah, that's how I open bags today. Okay, so your backplate is going to protect your motherboard from warping or breaking when you put this heavy old cooler on it, although I'll tell you guys, the CNPS 11X is not that heavy. Now the first thing I notice about this cooler is that this is one of the most dense fin arrangements I have ever seen on a CPU cooler. Now, what that allows Zalman to do is have more surface area. Now, well, more surface area, that means better cooling, right? Yes, in most cases more surface area means better cooling. So what if I like ramped it up and I made the surface area just a solid mass? Well then we wouldn't have better cooling because no air would pass through, that would be bad. So more surface area is better as long as you can push air through it. So what Zalman has done is they have made these areas with fins actually quite thin, okay, so you can see the fins are not very thick, okay, and then what they've done is they've enclosed it completely on the top with plastic and the bottom with another plastic shroud, and then they've put a big beefy fan on the front of it, nice big blades, I'm going to go ahead and assume they've designed this for static pressure more than anything else, so it's not going to spin at a huge RPM or anything like that, actually what RPM? Yeah, up to about 2000 RPM, okay, so that is going to be designed to push air through this, not necessarily at a high rate of speed, but at a fast enough rate to pull a lot of heat away from it, so let's compare surface area, right, so this has what appears to be, like look at this, compared to a Corsair A70, I mean that could be up to, hold on, okay, move the camera for a sec so I can see, okay, that looks like about double the fin density of an A70, so in literally half the physical size, it can have the same surface area as an A70, pretty neat, okay, heat pipes, in terms of heat pipes, we've got five heat pipes that are not heat pipe direct touch, although that doesn't always provide a performance advantage anyway, but we've got a very smooth looking base, there's your obligatory finger shot where you can see how shiny that is, the base appears to be convex based on looking at the reflection of my light through it, okay, so what that means is that with high mounting pressures, you've got nice good contact between the base and the CPU, five heat pipes making contact all along the base that are going to be, and that which is then touching your CPU, what else we got here, so yeah, it's a 120 mil fan which I mentioned a couple times, it looks like you can replace the fan, which was one of my complaints about my very first Zalman cooler, which was a CNPS 7000, I got the CU version, I decided to go all out and get the heavy CU version, which everyone assured me was going to break my motherboard, but I mean come on, we have coolers now that are like three, four times, five times the size of that thing in weight, so clearly wasn't that much of a problem, but anyway, that was one of my complaints about that heatsink, was that I wasn't able to change the fan, but it looks like they've remedied that, you can put on whatever 120 mil fan you please, I think that's pretty much it, that's all I wanted to say, thank you for checking out my unboxing today, the CNPS 11X ultimate extreme performance, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos, oh and one thing else to mention about this fan is that it has blue LEDs, so I just need to find, hey hold on, which one's the RPM sensor, there we go, yeah, blue LED fan, see, glows and stuff.