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OCZ Dominator II-CU and OCZ Ultra II Thermal Paste Review

Today, we are going to take a look at the OCZ Dominator II-CU Heat sink along with OCZ's Thermal Paste, the Ultra II.  OCZ is well known for their top-performing memory modules.  Let's see if their heat sink and thermal paste are also top performing.

OCZ's Ultra II Thermal Paste is somewhat like Arctic Silver 3.  Both of them have 99% micronized silver mixed with polysynthetic oil.  We will be comparing the Ultra II with Arctic Silver's newest compound, Ceramique.

Here is the Dominator II-CU heat sink.  When I first took it out of the box, I thought it looked a lot like the AMD Retail series of fans, so I decided that comparing this heat sink to an AMD Retail fan would be perfect.  The fan on this particular heat sink was fairly quiet for a 62mm fan spinning at 5000+ rpm.

Here are the specifications on the heatsink from OCZ's website:

The Dominator II-CU features what many companies call "micro-fin".  It is basically a heat sink with fins that are dense and more compact, allowing greater heat dissipation.  OCZ states that the fins are also skived and textured which should allow maximum performance of the heat sink without a large fan on top of it.

On the bottom of the heat sink, there is a thermal pad.  I suggest you take off the thermal pad and apply thermal paste to the CPU instead.

You can see that the machine sanding left some grooves on the bottom of the heatsink.

Taking off the thermal pad is fairly easy, either use a credit card or a flathead screwdriver to remove the pad. 

After removing the thermal pad, I would use sandpaper to get rid of scratches and some residue from the thermal pad.

Comparing the Dominator II-CU with the ThermalTake Volcano 11+, the Dominator II-CU appears to be shinier than the Volcano 11+ .  While this may not produce better temperature results, it shows that OCZ put more work into the bottom part part of the heat sink.

Comparing the tubes of thermal pastes, OCZ seems pretty generous, giving you a much larger amount of Thermal paste than Arctic Silver.

Here are OCZ's specifications on the Ultra II paste:

The Arctic Silver Ceramique is on the left, and the OCZ Ultra II paste is on the right.  Comparing the two compound visually, you can see that the Ceramique is much smoother in texture.  While the Ultra II is more chunky.  I suspect that the compound was stored in a warehouse too long, because the paste was really hard to apply to the CPU.  The paste kept sticking to the tip of the syringe.

Installation of the heat sink was fairly easy too, the retention system was very easy to clip onto the socket.  Here is a picture of the heat sink installed in the socket.

Test Setup:

-AMD Athlon 1100mhz @ 1400mhz (1.775volts)

-ECS K7S5A Motherboard

-512MB DDR PC2100 Mushkin Memory

-nVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 200

-RaidMax Case

-Arctic Silver Ceramique and OCZ Ultra II Thermal Compounds

I chose the AMD Athlon 1100mhz and put it at 1400mhz, since the Thunderbird series of AMD chips get very hot.  Since the chip gets very hot, we can see which heat sink can dissipate the heat better.  Either the AMD Retail heat sink, or the OCZ Dominator II-CU.

Here is a picture of the AMD retail fan that I will be using.

The results of the OCZ Dominator II-CU were pretty much even when compared against the AMD Retail fan.  Almost equal in some tests.  We also noticed that the OCZ Ultra II only appeared to work when it was introduced to higher temperatures.  The temperature results of the Ultra II during idle were higher than the Ceramique.  The results are great for the Dominator II-CU, since the heat sink is much more compact than the AMD Retail fan.  But the AMD Retail fan does a little bit better, because of its size.

The OCZ Dominator II-CU is great for users who are on a budget and need a compact heat sink and fan combination that offers moderate performance at a great price.  As for the OCZ Ultra II, it is very comparable to Arctic Silver 3, and OCZ is more generous in the amount of paste that they give you.

Techaddicts Computer Reviews would like to give the OCZ Dominator an 8.5 out of 10, and a rating of 8 out of 10 for the Ultra II Thermal Paste.

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