Design and Functionality
The cooler follows the same tower design with 8mm heat pipes carrying aluminum plates.
However, the Vendetta has at least two unique peculiarities that distinguish it from other tower-like coolers. I don’t mean the principle of direct contact of the heat pipes with the CPU heat-spreader because it is employed in coolers from Ice Hammer and XIGMATEK (see our article called Thermalright SI-128 and XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 CPU Coolers: 8mm of Efficiency). By the way, the Vendetta was actually developed for OCZ by XIGMATEK specialists.
The heatsink consists of 42 aluminum plates (0.3-0.4mm thick) placed at a distance of 2mm from each other.
The sides of the heatsink are open. Like with the Vanquisher, this will result in a loss of the air flow.
The unique V-shaped profile of the ribs with a groove in the center enlarges the useful area of the heatsink without increasing the dimensions of the latter.
Each of the 42 ribs also has 42 punched-out hollows:
According to the manufacturer’s website, these pimples increase the turbulence of air to avoid a stagnation of hot air amidst the heatsink ribs. I can’t smooth the ribs out and test the cooler two times with flat and pimpled ribs to see what is more efficient. So, I can’t tell you if these pimples are indeed helpful. Anyway, I will test the cooler as it is to see its overall efficiency. After all, the user is more interested in the end result rather than in theoretical engineering speculations.
To remind you, the cooler is compact at 97x79x134mm. The pipes have a diameter of 8mm, thus covering almost the whole surface of the CPU heat-spreader (with the addition of the space between the pipes). Among coolers with the direct contact technology we have tested so far in our labs only two were indeed efficient in their class. Both came from XIGMATEK: the HDT-S963 and HDT-S1283 models. The latter easily won the title of a super-cooler and features a very appealing price/performance ratio. The former is very much alike to the Vendetta, but the Vendetta seems to have a more advanced heatsink design.
