14 DAY TRIAL // OCZ is widely known as a memory manufacturer, but the company also designs high end performance products in other areas, including power supplies, cooling solutions, gaming peripherals and customizable laptops. The newest air cooling solution OCZ launched on the market is Vendetta 2, which features the Heat-Pipe Direct Touch (HDT) technology. Vendetta 2 is designed after the original Vendetta cooling solution, but adds great enhancements in the cooling performance of the product.
The past two years brought some major changes in the cooling solutions industry, one of them being the refinement of the HDT technology, which uses heatpipes and copper alone but provides much more cooling performance even than originally expected. The new technology adds high performance at lowers costs, making the traditional cooling methods a species on the verge of extinction.
Vendetta 2 uses the Xigmatek design, HDT-S1283, but there are some different enhancements that can be noticed by anybody. First of all, the fin structure is the one used in the original Vendetta, and it provides a larger friction surface than the HDT-S1283 design. The aluminum fins use a dimple design which slows the air flow from the large 120mm fan, allowing a better heat transfer. Also, the air is directed towards specific areas of the cooler, namely to where the heat rises directly from the heatpipes, for the fins are bowed in the center.
The HDT technology works greatly at the base of the Vendetta 2, allowing for the heat from the CPU to be directly transferred to the heatpipes and to the aluminum fins for air flow cooling. Traditional cooling solutions use heatpipes attached to an aluminum or copper base plate meeting the CPU IHS (Internal Heat Spreader). This design proved to be rather faulty, as there were obvious surface contact problems depending on the production quality. HDT offers better thermal solution and cheaper manufacturing process, allowing for lower retail prices.
Although the overall look of the OCZ cooler is not too appealing, since it uses unfinished aluminum fins, and uncoated heatpipes with a 120mm traditional fan, it uses quality sleeving to protect the wires and has a high quality feel. The fan uses a 4 pin connector, PWM compatible, as well as rubber sound proof fan mounts, which eliminate vibrations produced from the fan touching the heatsink.
The Vendetta 2 cooling solution also comes with an AM2 mounting clip, an LGA775 mounting clip using the dreaded push-pins, generic thermal paste, a 3-pin to molex 4 pin adapter, and the instruction manual.
The performance test conducted by overclockerspulse showed a cooling solution ready to enter the top tier class of performance heatsinks. The new OCZ cooler matches true quality performance, comes at a lower price and can be classified as highly valuable for extreme air cooling. Although it is a rather unstylish product, its cooling performance seems unbeatable even for a Thermalright solution, and this is a great plus for its manufacturer.
The tests were conducted on a system using Intel Q6600 B3 Stepping Core 2 Quad Processor (Overclocked 3Ghz 1.504Vcore), DFI Lanparty DK P35-T2RS Motherboard (Bios Date Code: 2008/05/02), Nvidia Geforce 6200 LE Graphics Card and OCZ Platinum Revision 2 DDR2-800 RAM. The softwares used during the testing are Windows XP Service Pack 3, Prime95 v25.3 Stress Testing, Core Temp Version 0.99 Thermal Monitoring Program and CPU-Z System Identification Program.
Here are the test results overclockerspulse published:
