[NEW] Thermaltake Volcano 9 Coolmod

Marsh Posté le 01-02-2003 à 16:39:57

voila une nouveauté qui va en séduire plus d'un !
chers amis forumeurs

voici une copie d'un article trouvé la http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/ [...] v9coolmod/

ThermalTake is arguably one of the best success stories in the world of mod suppliers. We've had a long relationship with the company and have seen their reputation grow as quickly as their product line. We've used the Volcano 7+ for a long time in various systems, but recently we've started to use Volcano 9's in most of our benchmark test beds. Today we're looking at the "CoolMod" version of the Volcano 9, which differs from the original Volcano 9 only in an aesthetic fashion.

What the heck is "CoolMod"?
Simply put, Thermaltake is using the CoolMod moniker in any of their fan products that feature LED lighting. Other companies like Epox have used terms like "Magic Light", but they all mean the same thing. In the case of the Volcano 9 CoolMod, Thermaltake took the concept one step further and markets this CoolMod as being able to change colour with your Hard Drive activity.

Detailed Look at the V9 CoolMod
The Volcano 9 CoolMod uses the exact same heatsink as the regular Volcano 9. This is a fairly massive aluminum fin heatsink with a copper core and a clip design that hooks onto all 3 plastic levers on your CPU socket. Looking at the below picture you can see just how similar the V9 and V9 CoolMod coolers look when placed side by side. The real difference lies in the plexi fan grille cover on the fan, and the wires leading out from the LEDs attached to the plexiglass.

There are 4 LEDs in total, one on each side of the cooler. Each LED has a separate wire leading out, but each wire from opposing LEDs actually joins together so that there are really only 2 power connectors. You might have noticed in the preceding pictures that the CoolMod fan is a little higher than the regular fan. This gap accomodates the added height of the LEDs embedded in the plexi grille, but I think it also serves the purpose of elevating the plexiglass and LEDs away from the fan surface.

Installation and Use
The Volcano 9 is a large cooler and installation can get a little tricky. The fan is larger than the bulk of the heatsink, while the clips hug tightly to the sides of the sink. This makes it harder to work around the heatsink and reach the clips. The side shields higher up on the heatsink, while very nice to look at, also made it harder to get at the clips. Thank goodness Thermaltake includes a handy slot on the clip so that you can use a flathead screwdriver to lever it into position. The "CoolMod" connectors are connected directly to your motherboard, one to the Power LED pins and the other to your HD LED pins. You have to unplug your case's Power and HDD LEDs to connect the CoolMod. If you're picky like me, you've probably already found this small fact annoying, and while Thermaltake warns that your motherboard may not be able to supply enough power to both the CoolMod and your case LEDs, most of you could easily jerry rig it so that you could get both connected at the same time. I think by now you can begin to understand just how the CoolMod works its colour changing "magic".

When you power your board, the pair of blue LED's light up. Any disk activity will cause the red pair to flicker, just like your HDD LEDs would have flickered if they were still connected. The blue LEDs by the way, look amazing in low light conditions. Check out the photos below to compare the CoolMod with the HDD idle (left) and with the HDD active (right).

Honestly when I first read the press materials on this cooler and saw their photos I was pretty impressed. I imagined a cooler with some sort of light transmitting plastic covering that could refract light evenly and change colours smoothly with HDD activity. Instead, the actual change in colours is really just the flickering of the red LEDs whenever your HD is active. And it's a fickle, jumpy sort of flicker most of the time. I'm not even sure if most of you would like it, though I know some of you might.

If you look at Thermaltake's site itself, the colour change is actually a lot nicer looking than what you see in our pictures. A few sites that reviewed the cooler also found the same thing. I think it's possible that not all the coolers have the same CoolMod "look" because the quality and brightness of the LEDs may vary from sample to sample. The other aspect of this is that if you leave either one of the coloured lights unplugged the CoolMod actually looks very fancy - especially in the blue colour. Sure you don't get the snazzy lighting flashes during HD activity, but I find the colour a lot more soothing. We found that you could also plug one of the LED connectors into the Power LED pins, and the other LEDs into the Message LED pins so that both LEDs stay lit at all times, which to me seems a lot nicer than having one of the two LEDs flickering on and off.

Fan speed vs Noise
One of the strongest features of the V9 cooler is its multiple fan speed options thanks to the fact that it's fan is actually Thermaltake's Smart Case Fan II. The fan speed ranges from 1300 to ~4800RPM, though our motherboard reported speeds around 200RPM higher than these numbers (meaning it reported ~1500RPM at the slowest setting and ~5200RPM at the fastest setting). At the lowest setting the fan is rated at only 17dB for noise - that's below most water cooling systems! At the other end of the extreme, operation at 4800RPM generates 48dB of noise, which subjectively sounds like you've installed a heavily trafficked airport tarmac right there in your system.

Fan speed can be controlled either manually, via a fanspeed knob, or automatically via a temperature sensor that is designed to be slipped underneath the chip or on the chip die. The automatic sensor will automatically adjust the fan speed between the two RPM extremes as they relate to temperature extremes of 20C and 55C. There's also a pair of pins that you can short with a jumper that will keep the fan at full speed.

I just wanted to comment that at the lowest speed setting, this is a VERY quiet cooler. And the lowest fan setting is actually not too bad. We were able to run the a XP 2700+ system modestly at this speed setting without problems... but a Thoroughbred A core 2100XP got a lot hotter than the Tbred B XP2700 chip.

Performance
We tested the V9 CoolMod to see what kind of performance we would get with a high end chip - in this case, an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (Tbred B core). Temperatures and fan speeds were measured using the invaluable SpeedFan utility, while full load temperatures were taken when CPU Toast was run. Toast is easily one of the most intensive CPU burn in/CPU load utilities you can use.

Fan Speed Idle Temperature Full Load Temperature
1520RPM 49C Crashes
3375RPM 42C 57C
5273RPM 40C 53C

As you can see, the idling chip runs at a hot but still useable 49C when the fan setting was at its lowest speed. At the highest speed setting the chip idles at a more reasonable, if still warm temperature. We suspect that our results were related to the fact that we used a lower silver content paste in our tests, but the ambient temperature was also quite warm, at around 24-26C. Remember that Full Load temperatures represent loads that are well beyond what you would see in regular use, and you can see that the V9 CoolMod actually allows very decent cooling without requiring the full fan speed.

By the way, we were able to use the CoolMod cooler in a modest (~3000RPM) setting even when overclocking our 2700+ to 2800+ and even 2900+ speeds, so Thermaltake's claim that this cooler is suitable up to a 2800+ is not unfounded, though we worry that any more aggressive overclocks would leave your system running at pretty high temperatures, even with the fan speed turned up.

Conclusion
The Volcano 9 is a nice cooler, very aggressive looking, and visually stunning when mounted on a motherboard thanks to its good looks and massive size. We placed the V9 next to a few generic Socket A coolers and the difference is quite shocking. If you're like us, you'll get giddy just seeing how this thing dominates the board. In times when visual appeal is as important as functionality, Thermaltake's coolers always take home top awards. Just look below and see how cool it looks on our Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra

We found the CoolMod feature to be a mixed sort of blessing. I'm not too fond of the HDD activity lighting, but if you keep either one or both LED colours running continously, the cooler is a lot better looking than just any old cooler without the CoolMod.

We tested the cooler on an Athlon 2700+ and found it to give fairly good results at all speed settings. The temperatures look a little warm, but in operation we found that even at the lowest fan speed setting you could manage in Windows. We tuned the fans a little faster during gaming though .

All in all a very nice cooler. We're now eager to see the new lineup that ThermalTake has prepared for 2003 .

Overall Score: 85%