Despite this new design, OCZ weren’t the first to implement it, Xigmatek have done it before OCZ, and Zaward before even Xigmatek. OCZ does not try to hide the fact that their vendetta is based on Xigmatek’s design, and even credits them in the first paragraph of their online product page. However, end users don’t care about who came up with a design for a product, but only which product performs better.

When OCZ copied the original design of the HDT-S1283 (What a name choice!), they took a 120mm fan based cooler and tweaked it into a 92mm based one. When copying the HDT-S1283 they took a lot of design hints, right down to the same style of box! However, even with the reduction in fan size, OCZ managed to maintain good cooling performance.

When the system boots up the CPU fan is revved up to full speed for a short time, this is quite noisy. But the speed is cut back to a much more pleasant volume during normal operation and system load. I had to strain to hear the fan over the rest of my system during normal operation.

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