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Thermaltake Volcano 7+
Review Date: October 9, 2002
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: 1CoolPC.com
Stock CPU's have gotten alot better lately. Not long ago they consisted of whimpy, undersized aluminum heatsinks with tiny underpowered fans. I have to give Intel and AMD kudos for vastly improving their stock cooling solutions - they have come a long way in a short time. But what if you still aren't satisfied and want something with a bit more chill?
In our never ending quest for the best in cooling gear, the question always pops up; "So what is the best CPU heatsink/fan?"
Well, Thermaltake certainly knows their stuff when it comes to cooling, and the Volcano 7+ one of the better CPU heatsink/fan combo's I have seen lately. At the time of writing, they retail for between $35-40 US.
This is the retail package that you will get. The first thing that I immediately noticed is that this package feels like it has a friggin' brick in it! It's heavy. Try not to drop in on your foot whilst barefooted, you could end up in the emergency room.
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The heatsink is fabricated from a solid block of copper, hence the weight and it's superior cooling ability. The 70mm fan is capable of 49CFM max output and is apparently made by Thermaltake themselves.
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Some assembly required... Here is everything that is in the package:
- Chrome heatsink cover
- Massive solid copper heatsink
- Instruction booklet
- Brackets for both socket370 and socket 478
- A cool aluminum Thermaltake case badge
- wiring harness
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Performance:
Test System:
- Abit IT7 MAX, Intel i845E Socket 478
- Pentium4 Northwood 2.4B Retail boxed o/c'ed to 2.8Ghz
- 1X 512MB PC2700 DDR CL2 Kingston ValueRam
- 2X Maxtor 40GB ATA100 7200RPM hard drives in RAID-0
- 1X Western Digital 120GB WD1200JB w/8MB cache
- Abit Siluro FeForce4 Ti4400
- 420 watt ATX 2.03 compliant PSU
- ioMagic 40x12x48 CD-RW
- Cisco Aeronet 340 Wireless LAN card
- WindowsXP Professional
- * Ambient room temp = 72*F
- * CPU at 100% load.
With the fan on "low" speed setting, the CPU temp is at 127*F. Kinda warm, but nothing to worry about at all.
Setting the fan speed to the "medium" setting drops the CPU temperature down by 4*F. Not bad at all.
Shifting into the "high" setting drops the temperature of the CPU by a whopping additional 7*F! Now that's what I'm talking about! This is an impressive drop in temps for air cooling.
Conclusion:
This is an impressive product from Thermaltake! If you need serious cooling on a budget, you might want to consider the Volcano 7+. It looks great, and cools even better. Even on the high setting, the fan isn't that loud at all - compared to some Alphas I have seen. On medium it is barely audible and on low you can't even hear it. The only drawback if you want to call it that, is the sheer weight of this thing. It is really quite heavy and may be a little hard to deal with if you take your heatsink off and on often. Other than that, this thing rocks. I give the Thermaltake Volcano 7+ the highest rating we have. 5X's!
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