ThermalTake Volcano II

Admin - 2007-02-20 19:16:29 in Cooling
Category: Cooling
Reviewed by: Admin   
Reviewed on: May 27, 2001
: ThermalTake
: ThermalTake
Introduction

As the speeds of processors increase so does the heat. If your not an overclocker you should still keep your cpu nice and cool while it prolongs the life of the cpu. When shopping for a heatsink you might look for one that is quiet. Noise doesn't bother me at all, but it does to some people. Especially for people in a quiet office or such. The Volcano II by ThermalTake isn't at all loud compared to my GlobalWin FOP38.

Today I'm going to do a comparison of the Volcano II and the Mini Copper Orb to see which one performs the best. If you have a KT7 series motherboard I'm happy to say that this cooler works fine on them. There have been issues with some heatink/fans not fitting on KT7 series motherboard because of the capacitor's being in the way. When testing the Mini Copper Orb I had a slight problem installing it because of those capacitor's. You can check out that review for more details.

Picture

Specifications

It is made of aluminum alloy, the Volcano II has the conventional fin type look common in most squared-based heatsinks on the market. It comes boxed together with the stock fan and a packet of thermal silicon compound for those of us that aren't fortunate enough to have Artic Silver II. The Volcano II is intended to be a lower cost cooler alternative versus the Alpha's and GloblaWIN's to name a few.

Pictures


Heatsink-

  • Dimensions: 60x60x69
  • Material: Aluminum

    Fan-
  • Dimensions 60x60x25mm
  • Bearing System 2 Ball Bearing
  • Rated Voltage 12V DC
  • Start Voltage 7V
  • Rated Current 0.22A (Max.)
  • Power Input 2.64W
  • Speed 4500 ± 10% RPM
  • Air Pressure 5.3mm-H2O
  • Air Flow 36 CFM
  • Noise Level 30.2 - 35.7 dBA
  • Connector 3pin

    • Picture

  • Installation

    The installation went okay. It was much like installing any other heatsink. Thermaltake takes the clip one step closer to perfection with a handy screwdriver fitted clip. With this clip you can simply insert a flat-head screwdriver, and put downward force on the clip to snap it into place. Needless to say the installation of the Volcano II was easy and flawless.

    Testing

    To test the temperatures, we brought the CPU to absolute full load by running the Prime95 Tests for about a half hour while running seti@home in the background.

    The system specs are:

  • 900mhz Duron
  • KT7-RAID
  • Voodoo3
  • 256MB PC133
  • Artic Silver II thermal compound
  • Western Digital ATA100 20GB 7200 rpm

    • Picture

    As you can see the Volcano II did exceptionally well in our tests compared to the Mini Copper Orb.

    Conclusion

    I recommend this HSF for systems which need effective cooling at low cost. I plan to leave the Volcano II in this system as it provides efficient cooling.

    Pros:

    Cons: