As we saw above the cooler comes well protected in a foam surround, which keeps it nice and snug when the cooler is in its box.

The package includes: the cooler; a 120mm fan; AMD and Intel mounting gear; thermal paste; three-pin-fan-header to molex connector and an installation manual.

Looking at the cooler, it is about the same size as the recently reviewed Noctua NH-U12P cooler. The Vendetta 2 however has more fins packed together than the Noctua ‘sink, so we shall have to see how it affects performance.

Here we can see both sides of the coolers, the grooves down the front of the cooler are for the rubber fan mounts that we shall look at in a bit.

The back of the cooler takes the smooth small curve at the front of the fins and expands it to a much shallow wider one; this will no doubt be great for ensuring the air doesn’t just pass over the fins without making good (cooling) contact.

Here at the top of the cooler we can see the anti-laminar devices in full force. The idea is that the dimples (and even embossed OCZ logo) will cause air turbulence and increase cooling performance over a smooth finned cooler.

The bottom of the heatpipes don’t have a very reflective finish to them, but as I always seem to point out, the finish isn’t the major factor in performance, just the fact that it is flat is important (and the heatpipes do seem to be flat). As I had seen the fan mounting rubber grommets before, I forgot to take a detailed picture of the mount this time round, so am going to have to borrow from the original Vendetta review:

You can see that the rubber grommets slot onto the fins, and then through the fan. This ensures that fan vibrations, and hence additional noise, are not passed through to the cooler.

With the 120mm fan attached, the cooler looks very capable, and almost menacing. A welcome addition from the original Vendetta is sleeving on the fan cable, it helps to make this cooler look that bit more clean.

For those of you that were wondering; the above picture is how the Vendetta 2 stacks up against the original vendetta cooler. As you can see the coolers appear practically identical with the Vendetta 2 just being a ‘stretched out’ version of the original. OCZ must be happy with the design to keep it essentially the same, so let’s see if it paid off in our testing…

Next Page – Installation and Testing

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