Introduction
Firstly, the cooler arrived well packaged in a full colour presentation box, with a see through plastic window at the front allowing you to see the cooler in all its shiny splendour. There are descriptions and figures on the box in both English and Japanese, so this is obviously an export product.
I unpacked the cooler and all of the extra¡¯s supplied. The cooler comes packaged with fixings for all compatible sockets, and a black and white single sheet instruction guide in both English and Japanese. The instructions are rather basic, but do provide ample guidance for the installation, even for a novice. Also included is a tiny spanner for if you need to install the motherboard backplate, and also a small sachet of thermal paste (about enough for a few installations, although I would recommend ditching this and using some Arctic Silver instead).

Installation
The installation was very simple on my socket 478 Prescott P4. All I had to do was remove the old cooler, clean up the CPU, and attach the Kamaboko Z to the P4 retention bracket. Care must be taken though to install the cooler the right way up, as the heatpipes will only be effective if the cooler is the right way round, also I had to apply a lot of pressure to the retention clips in order to get then properly inserted into the retention bracket, in fact I had to apply so much pressure to one of the clips (the last one) that I was a little worried that I might cause damage to the board, or bracket. The cooler does fit very securely though, with no after installation movement, which will help to prevent noisy vibrations that are commonplace on some cheaper ill-fitting units.
The next step was to attach the speed controller backplate (this is already wired up to the cooler) to an empty PCI slot in the back of the case. This was really easy, as it just involved removing a screw and pulling out a blanking plate, and then screwing the controller plate down.
Testing
 The testing was carried out on the following system:

• Alpine EZ Cool case
• Gigabyte 8IK1100 r2 motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 ¡®Prescott¡¯ 3.0GHz CPU
• 2 x 256Mb Arianet Performance DDR400 memory, in dual channel config
• NVIDIA 128Mb FX5200
• 2 x 80Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drives
• Pioneer DVR 108 DVD writer
• 2 Vantec 120mm Stealth fans @ 12v
• Enermax Noisetaker 600w PSU

The testing procedure involved taking a temperature measurement of the CPU while the system was idle, and then taking a calculated average of the CPU¡¯s temp during a 30 min intensive workout utilising copying a 50Gb batch of various sized files between hard drives, burning a full 4.5Gb DVD with various sized MP3 tracks and a movie, and a continuous run on SIS Sandra 2005 burn-in wizard. All temperatures were taken using the Gigabyte Easytune software.
The temperatures were taken at both idle and load with the Kamaboko Z fan speed at 1000rpm and at 3800rpm, in order to give a full gauge of the performance range of the cooler. The temperatures obtained are shown in the following table.

The table shows a average and acceptable performance at the minimum fan speed, but when you turn the fan up to full pelt at 3800rpm, it sounds like a airplane is taking off, but shows some great results which would be fantastic for overclocking, of just when running processor intensive tasks/games. The control backplate allows the user to select their own balance between performance and noise levels ¨C this is a great feature which a lot of cooler manufacturers should offer as standard.

Conclusion
 Overall, this is a fantastic cooler, which offers acceptable and almost silent operation at the minimum speed, and offers serious, although noisy performance at the higher speeds. This cooler would be great in any PC whether it¡¯s just for the office or the hardcore gamer, it even rivals the performance of some water-cooling setups, although with more noise at higher speeds.
 The Kamaboko Z is also great value at only £28.20 from QuietPC, and it¡¯s universal design means you can use it on most platforms.