 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Zalman CNPS 9900 Max, which is over 9000. I just thought I'd mention that. This is the red LED version. Fits on pretty much every socket you could care about, including 2011 FM1 and AM3+, which doesn't apparently include LG 1155, but we'll see once we open it. Ah, no, there you go. They were just messing with me. 11, 1366, 1156, 1155, 775, AM3+, AM3, AM2+, AM2, FM1, basically whatever CPU you have, you can put one of these on it and it will be good. Composite heat pipe. Zalman's composite heat pipe features a sintered metal type wick, resulting in outstanding capillary pumping performance and a high thermal conductive design of axial grooves, which increases the heat transfer rate by 50% compared to ordinary heat pipes. So this is theirs. This is more traditional types. And I'm going to tell you what's cool about that, because heat pipes would rely on gravity. They would if they weren't better designed than that. So Zalman is saying that they're better than gravity reliance design is better than other people's better than gravity reliance design. Now if you don't know a little something about how heat pipes work, then I'm going to do a short little lesson here that might help you. The way heat pipes work is they have a liquid inside. It can be water, it can be something else, and the liquid boils, vaporizes, and carries with it liquid and heat up to the extremities of the pipe, where it then condenses and flows back to the bottom where it will get heated up again as a liquid again. This is an extremely efficient way of moving heat around. However, when you take it and you install it in a case, all of a sudden you can't rely on just hotter things rising, helping, and you can't rely on gravity to carry the liquid back down to the CPU. So that is why there's textures or patterns on the inside edges of the heat pipe to carry the liquid back to where it needs to be heated up again so it can carry heat away from your CPU. So Zalman's basically saying their way of doing that is more efficient so their heat pipe will perform better than others, particularly in scenarios where it's not going to be gravity assisted. So if you have a desktop case where it's going to be sitting like this, honestly, it probably makes no difference whatsoever. But since almost everyone's using a tower these days, it will probably be a factor for you. I've always liked Zalman's mounting mechanisms. They tend to come with a lot of pieces, but they tend to also be very flexible, and once you get them on, they're very secure as well. So let's have a look at what we've got included here in terms of accessories. Fan resistor for, well, the fan, as well as a four-pin version. So you've got a three-pin or a four-pin version, depending on what you want to use. You've got some of their included thermal goop, ZennM STG2. Okay, you've got, ha-ha, you've got an included tool so you'll actually be able to install something. Let's hope it was something. I've seen this before. Ah, these ones. There you go. So you've got like a little ball and socket thing going on here so that you can actually screw things in from a weird angle. It's very useful. Okay, you've got your backplate, Zalman case badge. You've got a non-conductive, like, you know, shield for that. You've got AMD mounting hardware right here. You've got your Intel mounting hardware right here. There's your 775, your 1156, your 1366. And then I don't actually see the, oh, I guess one of these is probably something to do with it. Okay, so it's a little complicated. Comes with a lot of pieces, like I said, usually very secure. That's what I've come to expect from them. And they've actually got everything very, very well laid out for you here. Intel clip, AMD clip. And then all the installation instructions will make it pretty straightforward. This is not like the, ah, what was it? The N-Tech cooler box, which took me about 45 minutes to get installed on the motherboard because it, like, things inter-, like, once you got it starting to be installed, things started to interfere with each other and you couldn't install it. It's pretty tough. So that's kind of a neat way to pack this, to make sure that nothing gets bent, you know, so the fins don't, fins don't get damaged, so the heat pipes don't get bent. So it's got a total of six heat pipes here, guys. So right there, you got four of them coming out one way, leading to this guy. Two are, two of them here, two of them on the inside track. And then you've got two coming out the other side that are leading to the other ring of aluminum fins. So these are copper heat pipes, aluminum fins, and the base is extremely shiny, so there's the obligatory finger shot there where you can see it's basically a mirror, mirror surface. So how does this work? What would make this cooler more efficient in a smaller space than other ones? I'll tell you guys right now what makes it more efficient. The fact that it has a central fan and it is taking advantage of not only the air that it is pushing out the back of the fan, but also the air that it is bringing in from the front. One of the things that's gonna make it quieter than what you would typically see as well is the fact that there's not a lot of shrouding. You're not forcing a lot of the airflow at or around or through things that are restrictive and noisy. So you generally get very quiet performance with Zalman coolers, although not necessarily like the most extreme because let's face it, if you have a cooler that's three times the size of this, then it's no secret which one is probably gonna keep your CPU at lower temperatures. What I really wanna do is I wanna check this one out in their, where is it, Z11 Plus HF1 edition, which has red LEDs. And so what we'll be doing is once we're done with this guy, we're gonna throw a motherboard and a power supply in there and have a look at what an all Zalman-cooled encased machine is gonna look like. So thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And actually here, just get some close-ups of what it all looks like. Very shiny. Zalman is a master of sort of the detail of a CPU cooler, making sure it looks really good, looks sharp, performs well. One of my first aftermarket CPU coolers I ever bought was a Zalman CNPS 7000CU. I got the all copper version because I wanted to be baller like that. Yeah.