I am here again today looking at yet another cooler in my obvious search for the best cooling solution. The OCZ Dominator 2-CU is going to be the one that gets picked apart today. This cooler looks similar to what would come with a retail Athlon XP, but OCZ has integrated a copper bottom on it. There's not much to say about this cooler. Its not flashy and exotic like some of the other coolers on the market but it did have one plus, it performed excellent. I didn't expect it to receive the numbers that it did, I was actually expecting not to be able to complete the load test because of my overclock.

The fan on this cooler is a 60X10 Whisper Quiet ball bearing fan spinning at 5300 RPM's with about 25 cfm at 40dBA. The heat sink is made of a single piece of aluminum with a copper insert in the bottom. This heat sink uses a textured fin technology, and an incredible fin density of 40 fins. The heat sink's dimensions are 62X70X44.

• ASUS A7N8x Deluxe
• Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1.83Ghz
• 512Mb PC 3200 2X256Mb
• Windows XP
• Vantec Nexus MFP (Review Coming)

Before looking at the numbers I wanted to talk about the reason I probably wouldn't recommend this heat sink. Believe it or not it has nothing to do with its performance because it was able to stand up to other higher end coolers. The reason I wouldn't recommend this cooler is because it uses a single prong clip that I literally had to put foam under my motherboard and push with every ounce of strength I had. The clip is way to tight and OCZ needs to use a three prong that has less resistance. There are to many newbie's out there that are going to be crushing there CPU's core because of this. I have installed thousands of coolers so I am no where near a beginner.  In all that time, I have never crushed a core and I have never broke a CPU socket clip but this time I was worried about it.  I was afraid this cooler was going to break my perfect record. In fact, at one point I packed the cooler up and was going to fail it before even testing it because I didn't want to put a few hundred dollars in hardware at risk for it.  However, after thinking it through I decided to go ahead with the review. I would like to hear other peoples experiences with this cooler and if they have had the same problems as I have. Maybe I just have a defective cooler.

As you can see the OCZ dominator 2-CU performed really well. This cooler was right on par with the Thermaltake Volcano 9

After testing I got a new respect for this cooler, but that fact remains its clip is just way to tight and I am sure that is part of the reason it performed so well. I don't think I will recommend this cooler to the masses but if your looking for something quiet then this is a well performing quiet cooler. Just make sure you have it professionally installed.