OCZ Vendetta 2

The Heatsink

The OCZ Vendetta 2 is, unsurprisingly, very similar structurally to its predecessor the original OCZ Vendetta and shares many of the features that made the original Vendetta such a winner, maintaining the efficient tower/stack design with cooling fins arranged in line with case exhaust fan airflow and a fan blowing cool air towards the rear of the case. This design is now generally accepted as the most efficient for a modern full size heatsink, as it works with a case’s airflow to maximise performance, although the Vendetta 2 doesn’t exploit the case airflow to quite the extent that other coolers have done.

Structurally the Vendetta 2 uses the same triple “U” shaped copper heatpipe design as the original Vendetta, with the heatpipes flattened and machined at the base to form a direct contact surface with the CPU. These heatpipes also act as the sole structural basis of the Vendetta 2, with no additional support bolts to hold up the cooling fin stack.

At the base of the heatpipes as with other direct contact coolers, there's a small aluminium block to provide a mounting point and to keep the three heatpipes separate. Sadly the issue of the original Vendetta’s grand canyon-esque pits where the heatpipes meet the aluminium block have made an unwelcome return, although these didn’t cause the original Vendetta too many performance problems.


Due to the Vendetta 2's use of a 120mm fan over the original Vendetta's 92mm, everything has been expanded in size over the original to compensate. This has meant that the heatpipes have been lengthened by a good 10 centimetres each to allow for the extra cooling fins and a larger machined contact surface to improve CPU contact with the physically larger AMD processors

While the Vendetta 2 hasn't significantly increased the number of cooling fins on show, rising from forty two to fifty, their surface area has been enlarged by making the heatsink much wider. To meet LGA 775 guidelines for motherboard clearance, this has meant a slightly taller design for the Vendetta 2 to provide the cooling fin clearance over the Northbridge and PWM coolers.


The aluminium cooling fins themselves represent almost every advance in heatsink technology we’ve seen in the last few years, with a heavily dimpled uneven surface, indented centre and curved uneven rear surface all employed to increase air turbulence over the fins and improve cooling performance. However, there have been a couple of tweaks made, with the front surface of the cooler now being flat and flush to the cooling fan rather than concave on the original Vendetta and the angle of the curve on the back of the fins reduced somewhat.

For mounting the fan, the vibration dampening rubber grommets make a return, sliding over the cooling fins and pulling through the fan’s screw holes to securely attach the 120mm fan. Obviously the grommets will support any similarly designed 120mm fan, so if you have a particular favourite high speed or low noise fan you can easily fit that instead.