Questionable Build Quality

For months I heard rumours coming out of the OCZ camp about why the Cryo-Z was so late to market. Nearly everyone I spoke with about the production model told me that the company outsourced to build the unit was delivering products of questionable quality. Since then I have found a few forum posts by OCZ staff that hinted at a large amount of Cryo-Z units that may be sold as scratch and dent or damaged goods.

It has also come to light that every Cryo-Z sold through PC Power will be hand inspected by OCZ engineers, a process that takes a large amount of time, especially if parts have to be removed from several units to make a perfect or near perfect product like we have come to expect from OCZ. With several new product categories of products coming from OCZ it would be hard for the company to take a couple of engineers off of one project to put on a two year old product that the company may lose money on.

Most of the issues I found with the Cryo-Z have to do with the construction of the case. Here we see that the top cover does not sit level with the top of the face plate.

Here we see several deep scratches in the sale location.

There is also a fairly large gap between the two mating surfaces.

On the side of the front aluminium we have some corrosion starting to form. Also, the steel on the frame is starting to rust.

Rust is starting to form on other parts of the frame as well.

On the top and side covers glue has been applied to hold the mesh metal, but in some places glue has seeped past and is visible.

One of the screws for the power plug was not put in far enough to totally secure the power plug, and the screw has also been stripped out, most likely from a power drill screw.

The cover for the compressor's electronics came to us loose and was not attached to the compressor.

Here we see that the high density foam was not long enough from the original factory, and another type of foam was needed to cover the tube coming from the compressor.