Zalman Reserator 1 Water Cooling Kit Review

[Zalman's] first foray into water cooling, the Reserator 1 kit with accompanying ZM-WB2 Gold waterblock seeks to redefine the meaning of silent, as far as CPU cooling goes at least. As the name suggests, the Reserator is a radiator and reservoir combined, along with integrated pump, packing everything you need bar waterblocks into one integrated package. Completely fanless, logic dictates that without something to move air over the radiator, the radiator must be quite large and the water volume must be vast, for it to work effectively. How right that logic is, let’s take a closer look.

..The Reserator is aimed at a different kind of computing enthusiast than the overclocker and I’ve seen one too many reviews berate it for not letting the reviewer run his CPU at silly speeds. They’re getting the wrong end of the shiny blue 23.5 inch stick. It’s to make your stock or mildly overclocked PC as quiet as a mouse. A dead mouse. Plumb in a GPU waterblock which Zalman will happily sell you and it’s only your power supply and hard drives that’ll conspire against you to make your PC audible. Zalman will even sell you parts to shut them up too.

It won’t take your CPU to the speeds a good air-cooler, like the Hyper-6 used in testing, will. But then it doesn’t make a racket. Cooler Master say the Hyper-6 is silent with the fan on low-speed. Quiet? Yes. Silent? You’re joking. The Reserator is silent. It all depends on what you want. Do you want to overclock? Look elsewhere. Do you mind a wee bit of fan noise? Look elsewhere. Do you want is-my-PC-even-switched-on silence? Give Zalman your money now, they thoroughly deserve it.

Score: 10/10

Zalman Reserator 1 @ HEXUS