OCZ / Vindictator Fan Orientation Vindictator Fan Orientation

When mounting the Vindicator it is of paramount importance to assure the correct orientation of the airflow across the array. The Vidicator utilizes two heatsink assemblies, one that is close to the base (primary) and the secondary connected to the base via heat pipes. Both arrays play a crucial role in managing the thermal load of the processor in a synergistic fashion. However, the primary heatspreader is orientationally selective, which means that it only works if the fan is mounted in a way as shown in Figure 1 but is largely ineffective if the fan is mounted as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

To demonstrate the effect of correct vs. wrong orientation, we ran thermal analysis of the two different scenarios.



System Configuration:
ASUS P5WDG2 WS Pro
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition P955 (Presler)
2 x OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Titanium EPP-Ready Edition
OCZ 780W GameXStream
MSI NX 6200TC
Ambient RT: 22 degrees Celsius

The system was booted into the CMOS setup (BIOS) and die temperature was read off the hardware monitor. Under these conditions, the P955 draws approximately 80W of power (measured before the voltage regulator module), which is enough load to monitor performance differences of different coolers in a real life environment. In addition, the CMOS setup generates constant, reproducible load on the CPU without any vagaries introduced by an operating system and additional software.

Results: Using the proper orientation of the Vindicator cooler dropped the die temperature read-out in the hardware monitor by more than 10 degrees Celsius compared to a 90 degree rotation of the airflow. Taking into account the ambient room temperature, this is equivalent to a 25% lower die temperature that is solely achieved by correct orientation of the fan relative to the primary fin array.