Category: Cooler
Manufacturer: OCZ Technology
Product: Vindicator CPU Cooler
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $38.50

We’ve never been shy about our opposition to the direction this industry is going in terms of power consumption. Modern desktop computers, despite their relatively low normal power consumption, are far and away the least environmentally friendly appliance in most homes. Although many appliances in the home have a far greater sustained power draw than computers – such as hair dryers, irons, and microwaves – those items are not turned on 24/7. High-performance gaming computers these days can have a sustained idle power consumption well into the 700W range. We obviously see how everything you’ve read so far in this article makes us come off as a bunch of environmentalists, but that is only partially true. The fact of the matter is there would be no argument if modern computers sucking up 700W at idle conditions actually made good use of that power. Sure, upgrading to a more efficient power supply will drop your maximum power draw and reduce the amount of energy lost at that device in particular, but the main problem these days does not come from the source; dreadfully inefficient components are heating up the debate over green computing on a daily basis – literally.

We’re all for the creation of monstrously powerful processors capable of pumping frames at rates previously unimaginable; after all, such products control our livelihood in this line of work. What we tend not to support are devices that so blatantly waste a significant amount of the power supplied to them; products that generate disproportionate quantities of heat compared to their useful output. Understandably there will be components throughout the developmental phases of certain technologies that carry this trait. However, when a component has had time to mature in a mostly unchanged form, the goal should be to cut power consumption rather than increase functionality with no regard for energy lost due to heat. Unfortunately that seems to be the prerogative of pretty much every influential computer hardware manufacturer, virtually sentencing the end-user to a constant struggle with heat removal.

Luckily for us, however, there are other companies that bend over backwards to help us with our quest to keep components running cool. OCZ is a company most of you are probably fairly familiar with – their memory products have been reviewed numerous times at FPS Labs. However, OCZ is not a one-component house. The product being reviewed today is called the OCZ Vindicator CPU Cooler. If you are not accustomed to associating OCZ with cooling, we’re not surprised. It has been a fairly long while since the company was competitive in the cooling space. However, traveling back about six years – to the reign of the Gladiator, Goliath, and Ultra 2 thermal compound - shows us that OCZ certainly knows cooling, and knows it well.