To start with lets get the specs and box content out of the way so we can get down to the nitty gritty of the review.

Spec wise the cooler is designed for LGA 775 socket boards, it has a 4pin. 3 wire connector for monitoring and is designed for Intel CPUS up to Core2 Duo. It has 4EA Copper pipes and measures L100 x W94 x H77mm, weighs 562g and has a fan speed of 900-2300rpm (16-30dBA).

With the contents you get everything necessary to install the unit, a rather simple manual, some high performance thermal grease, mounting spring screws and a back plate.

Installation was fairly simple but for users with existing setups you will have to remove your board in order to attach the back plate. The back plate has a paper film that has a coating of what we can assume is insulation material however the manuals installation translation confuses things slightly by stating that you need to "Remove the paper film from the upper surface of a back plate to use an insulating tape"

Attaching the copper heat sink and fan was technically easy but due to our board design - see gallery picture - things get pretty tight with the heat sink and fan virtually touching our north bridge fan and we had to move back our two ddr2 sims as the four heat pipes would have been touching them (though to be fair our sims did have heatsink covers which added to their bulk). Our board was also an older model but you need to consider the fact that if you don’t have much space between the CPU and memory slots you may not be able to use all four memory banks at once.

Applying the thermal grease will also need a bit of mastering due to it being of high quality and extremely thick, it can be tricky adding the paste to the smooth surface of your CPU, but this is only a minor niggle.

Once the unit is installed we monitored the temperature over the week, impressively the ZEROtherm has its own temperature monitoring sensor which allows the fan speed to be adjusted accordingly. So for most part the rpm during low load is kept around the 1000 mark which makes it fairly quite and during heavier loads the CPU fan speed rises as and when it needs to (useful for overclocking).

We decided to test the CPU cooling both when our processor was at its default setting and also when it was overclocked. During initial boot and medium Windows use we found that our default CPU clock (3.2Ghz) was running at 38oc -420c at 953 - 1061rpm. But we must point out that our Test Rigs 3.2GHz CPU was housed in a case that was coated in Acousti Dampening foam - which ads slightly to the temperature, plus we only have two small 80mm case fans circulating air in and out of the case, plus a 120mm fan on the underside of our PSU.

During a light gaming session the fan speed rose to 1700rpm and the CPU was running between 45 - 48oc. We found that for heavy session the temperature got to around 49oc but the fan speed hit 2300rpm - but was still good.

It’s only when we started to overclock our CPU that we grew to respect the ZEROtherm. Firstly we decide to OC our CPU after a few hours of Windows use so the CPU was already warmed up, we then ran NVIDA's ntune custom CPU/memory tuning program for 30minutes which pushed the CPU temp to 55oc, but bear in mind that we were also downloading a large file off the internet at the same time and running MSN (technically you are not suppose to do this during a tuning setup) which was deliberate to try and push the CPU temperature up further.

After a computer reset - due to the program becoming a bit unstable we then manually OC (thanks to the findings of the ntune program) our CPU to 3728Mhz from 3200Mhz and our memory from 667Mhz to 776Mhz.

At the moment our CPU has been running under medium Windows use for a few hours and the temperature is between 42-44oc running with an rpm of 1339rpm. During a light gaming session the temperature rose to only 50oc and a heavier session it rose to nearly 55oc again - but did not go past this.

What's also impressive is how quick the CPU temperature drops after you have come out of a game, within moments the temperate had dropped back to 45oc (whilst our CPU was still overclocked)

So basically even though our CPU was running nearly 600Mhz faster the temperatures were about the same. However we can not vouch for Core2CPU temperatures but we just wanted to point out there is room for OC potential on this cooler and considering it only costs £25 you are getting an excellent product for a cracking price.