Did you just pick up a shiny new Core 2 or Athlon 64 X2 CPU and now you're wondering which aftermarket heatsink would be best to take your processor to new heights? If so, today's article is for you. FiringSquad takes a look at 12 different heatsinks from 6 companies. Here's a bit:

Our greatest surprise came from the Evercool Sharks cooler. Evercool isn't known for high performing CPU coolers, but the Sharks cooler definitely assured us that Evercool wanted a notch in the market. The Sharks cooler was only one of five others to not hit the 60 degree load barrier. The Sharks cooler featured extremely easy installation and superb build quality. The Evercool Sharks wins our prestigious Bulls Eye award. Another great cooler that presented an amazing value because of its great price and tremendous performance is the Cooler Master Hyper 6+. It is a great improvement over the much smaller Hyper 6. For only $32 you get a cooler that will perform up there with the greatest on the market. Not only that but it will also maintain a fan noise lower than 38db. The Cooler Master Hyper 6+ cooler is the second cooler to win our Bullseye award.

The biggest disappointment of this roundup is Zalman's CNPS9700. It was by far the most expensive cooler, almost $20 more than the Scythe Infinity, yet the Zalman only performed average at best. We may have gotten a defective unit because our CNPS9700 performed worse than the older 9500, but until we can verify this, we will stick to our current conclusions. We have never had anything but praise to say about Zalman's products, but this new cooler was a huge disappointment. Another huge disappointment is the whole collection of Aerocool products. They all ended up at the bottom of the performance charts. They're all offered at different price points, but performed poorly in comparison to other coolers in their price ranges. Another company that disappointed us was Silverstone. In our testing, their NT05 performed abysmally yet costs more than the Cooler Master Hyper 6+ and as much as the Evercool Sharks.