Vulcan. Raumoko. Hephaestus. Thermaltake. Spot the odd one out. The savvier of you might have suggested Thermaltake -- but you’d be wrong. You see, there is no odd one out -- these are all gods of Volcanoes.
Vulcan. Raumoko. Hephaestus. Thermaltake. Spot the odd one out. The savvier of you might have suggested Thermaltake -- but you’d be wrong. You see, there is no odd one out -- these are all gods of Volcanoes. It seems Thermaltake have been a bit more productive of late than these other slackers, as it’s just released the Volcano 11 heatsink fan. Nyuk. Nyuk.
The biggest change over its predecessor, the Volcano 9 (WTF happened to the Volcano 10?), is that the base is now built entirely of Copper, unlike the Aluminium hybrid construction of the Volcano 9. It’s still chocked with features; whether or not these are worthwhile is debatable. The best of these however is a fan speed control knob, which allows you to manually set the speed of the fan between 1,300rpm and 4,800rpm. Of course, at the lowest speed the Volcano 11 cools about as well as a sweaty sock, but more about that in a minute. The other feature is a temperature probe that can automatically control the fan speed for you. At 20C, the fan spins at its lowest speed, rising to hit full speed when the temperature reaches 55C.
The heatsink clip is notable for its ease of use, as well as the fact that it uses every lug on the CPU socket. This is reassuring for those of us who have been through the agony of losing the centre socket lug due to a dodgy HSF clip.
When it came time to test the Volcano 11, we of course had to put it up against the beloved Thermalright SLK-800, the undisputed leader of Heatsink Land, paired up with the beastly Delta EFB0812HHE 80mm fan. Ambient temperature was a constant 20C throughout the test.
At the lowest fan speed, the Volcano hit a whopping 79C -- basically useless. However, at the highest fan speed, this was a much cosier 62C, but the fan was almost as loud as a Delta at this speed. This sounds like a reasonable temperature. . . until you compare it to the chilly 47C that the SLK-800 managed to cool our test bench to.
While it’s got some nice touches in its feature list, as well as a very CPU friendly clip, the Volcano 11 is let down sorely by what really counts -- its ability to keep your CPU nice and cool.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012