Installation:

The OCZ Technology Vendetta CPU Cooler was installed in a system with the following components for this review:

» Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Dual Core processor
» ASUS P5KC P35 ATX motherboard
» Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB hard drive
» Aeneon XTUNE 2GB PC3-10600 DDR3 dual channel memory
» PC Power and Cooling 750 Quad Silencer power supply
» Cooler Master iTower 930 ATX
» Windows Vista Home Premium

In general, installations with this type of "push-pin" mount for Intel coolers is rather simple. But, I would recommend attaching this cooler to your motherboard prior to installing the board into a case. Unless you have a rather large case with plenty of room around the CPU socket, you may find pushing the pins through the holes on the board a bit tricky. The heatsink fins over hang the tops of the pins, and I could not get my fingers in there easily.

The image below shows the cooler in place. While not so clear in the picture, there was no issue with interference with any motherboard features or components in the general area, such as the power supply and memory. The cooler is rather compact, just nto compact enough to give you clear access to the mounting pins.


Testing:

To test the thermal performance of the OCZ Technology Vendetta CPU Cooler, the idle and load temperatures were monitored using CoreTemp 0.95.4 in conjunction with OCCT 1.1.1b. The idle condition was established by letting the system sit at the Window's desktop with only CoreTemp running for a period of at least 30 minutes. The load condition was established by running OCCT for a period of at least 60 minutes set to stress the CPU and memory. All phases were executed with the processor overclocked from a default setting of 3.0GHz (9x333MHz) and 1.32V, to 3.6GHz (9x400MHz) and 1.35V.

For comparison purposes, the Vendetta was tested head-to-head with the Kingwin RVT-9225 and the stock cooler provided with the retail packaged Intel E6850 processor. To show just how physically similar the Kingwin Revolution and OCZ Technology Vendetta are, I took the following images of them side by side. From a quick glance they are nearly identical! Same height and similar looking fans, but as mentioned the OCZ Technology unit has larger heatpipes and the design of the aluminum fins is optimized for thermal transfer.


The chart below details the results from all three coolers achieved while maintaining an ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius: