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Zalman has come up with an incredibly neat idea in the Reserator 1. This external PC cooling solution uses a finned blue-anodized aluminium tower that stands 592mm tall (that’s two feet in old money) and is as near as damnit silent in operation. Generally, water-cooling solutions are used as a tool by overclockers who are looking to squeeze the maximum performance out of their CPU and graphics card. Water-cooling allows you to deal with the extra heat that is inevitably generated when you crank up the core voltage and clock speed, and although a water cooled system isn’t necessarily noisy the system still uses a fan (or fans) to draw air through the heat exchanger. The result is that a water-cooled PC will have more efficient cooling than an air-cooled PC as you can draw heat away from specific components without blowing hot, toasty air over the rest of your PC’s innards.

But water cooling is not a solution that is particularly tempting to PC owners who want to quieten their PC down, and quietening PCs just happens to be Zalman’s core business. So, Zalman has built a water-cooling solution that uses no cooling fans, and that thinking has led Zalman to choose an external water reservoir which uses the finned surface of the reservoir itself as a passive heat exchanger.

We’re not too keen on the name but Zalman tells us that Reserator is an amalgam of the words 'Reservoir' and 'Radiator, and we guess that it’s called Reserator 1 to give Zalman the option of bringing out more Reserator models in the future.

There are two main components in the big, heavy box in the shape of a Zalman ZM-WB2 Gold CPU water block and the Reserator itself - you also get a length of silicon hose and a bag of connectors.

The ZM-WB2 Gold is also available as a separate part with a cost of £45.82 inc VAT, and as the water block sits at the heart of any water-cooled PC it needs to be a decent piece of kit or you’re doomed to failure before you start to build your water cooled system. Weighing in at a heft 447g, the ZM-WB2 Gold has a copper base which is gold plated (hence the Gold name), while the cover is blue anodized aluminium with two vertical hose outlets. The water block has a diameter of 64mm and stands a nominal 31mm tall, although the vertical measurement is a little misleading as you need to add on at least another 50mm to route the water hoses in a gentle curve without kinking them. The water block fits Socket 478, Socket A, Socket 754 and Socket 940 processors - we strongly suspect that the ZM-WB2 will also work with Socket 939 processors but we didn’t have the necessary hardware to hand in order to double check. Essentially the water block fits any current desktop processor so long as the motherboard is designed to spec with mounting holes around the socket and provided it doesn’t have excessively tall capacitors encroaching on the processor area.

We fitted the water block to an Asus SK8N Socket 940 motherboard, which is one of the trickier installations, as you have to pop off the original backplate on the underside of the motherboard and replace it with alternative plate that Zalman supplies. Once that is fixed in place with a couple of nuts you secure the water block with a clamp that is retained with two thumb screws. Zalman supplies all the fasteners that you need and despite the fact that it all looks rather flimsy the water block is held down very effectively with almost no chance that you could get it wrong. We wouldn’t dare suggest that any PC hardware is foolproof but in our opinion this kit is idiot resistant at the very least.

Zalman includes a three-metre length of blue silicon hose with an external diameter of 12mm and an internal diameter of 8mm which you can easily cut with a decent pair of scissors. The fittings that it supplies can also accommodate 13mm/9mm hose. Now you have the water block in place and need to connect it up to the Reserator, although you also have the option of adding a Zalman GWB water block to your graphics card for £29.37 inc VAT, so long as it has mounting holes around the GPU.

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