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Zalman Reserator XT Hybrid Liquid Cooling System
Zalman VGA Water Block High Performance ZM-GWB8800 Ultra GTX

One of the most reputable companies out there with a keen focus on cooling and silence for years has been Zalman.

So, who on this planet with a feel for the computer industry does not know Zalman ? Think about that for a moment. Yes .. hardly anyone. And despite the fact that Zalman is not really out there in terms of excessive marketing we can assume they got their brand reputation by really earning it.

When you think about Zalman then two things will come to mind. Those being cooling and silence. The entire company philosophy has these two main features embedded into the company structure. Zalman makes reputable cooling products with a minimum amount of sound and that's just great as there is a huge market for that.

In the past we have tested a good number of items from them already. Among them the really awesome Reserator water-cooling products. Recently they released a new model of that Reserator cooler namely the Reserator XT.

The trick about this incredibly sexy product is that thanks to a low-noise fan we can now push more performance out of their water-cooling product. So here at Guru3D we figured hmm, why not test the Reserator XT with a high-end system. Obviously we took a Core 2 Duo based platform, and then decided to pick up the ZM-GWB8800 VGA waterblock cooler as well to do some seriously nasty stuff on a 8800 Ultra. The ZM-GWB8800 blocks (designed for nVidia 8800 GTX/Ultra series) cleverly cool not only the main GPU but also the other components around the graphics card, such as the memory, FET and I/O chipset. The blocks are very low profile (only 31mm high) and so wont take up any further slots. That means they are also fully compatible with SLI systems.

What we'll do today is water-cool a GeForce 8800 Ultra, in combo with water-cooling that Core 2 Duo processor. The aim is obviously to see if we can reach acceptable temperature in a near silent environment.

And oh boy did that work alright. Over the next pages this article will become a large pictorial including a huge photo-shoot of the products, yet also the complete installation and obviously a Guru3D test.

Enjoy, next page please.