More on the Volcano 7 I did some testing of my different CPU coolers. I compared the Thermal Take Volcano 7 against the stock AMD fan that comes with the 2100+. Now if you look at the Volcano, it's huge! It is 80x80x25 mm! It bottom has a copper insert so that the part that touches the CPU is copper. As you may or may not know, different metal coduct heat better then others, # Aluminum, this gets the job done, but is slow at releasing the heat one collected. # Copper, this get the heat off the CPU quick, pretty good releasing it # Silver, this blows the other 2 away, it conducts heat incredibly well, so if any company wants to send me a silver CPU cooler, I would LOVE to review it for you, I'm not even going to guess at a price. Also, the Volcano 7 has a thermal sencor on it that take the current ambient case temp, and then adjust the fan speed to cool the processor better. Sounds like a good idea? Well it isn't. I'm a PC Mod junkie and with 13 other fans in the case, the sencor thought it was doing a good job even though my poor CPU was dying. I'm not exactly sure why TermalTake went with the design they did. Why not put the sencor on the CPU? Doesn't make sence. Anyway, I thought I would look for a way to get the fan to max out at 5000RPM at all times. I took the fan off and there was the promised land. I took the thermal sencor and put it in the heat sink of the unit. The temp there was much higher and should force the fan to run at high RPM's at all times. The mod did work, but I still was seeing very high temps on the CPU. So I ran some more tests, I changed my setup for each test. I ran each chop through each of the following * No thermal grease, no shim * No thermal grease, copper shim insert * Thermal grease, no shim * Thermal grease, plus copper shim It was amazing, no matter the configuration, I kept getting the exact same temps. The stock beat out everytime, almost by 10 degrees C. I find this amazing, due to the fact that the Volcano is just soo much bigger and has the copper on the bottom to move the heat off quicker. As you can see, the stock AMD blew away the "over clockers" cooler. I'm going to try and sell mine on Ebay. But after reading this review, who would buy it? Note: Idle = Idleing in Windows XP Pro Full Load = Encoding a DVD into MPEG, CPU usage 100% at all times Posted by chris at 11:04 PM PC Cooling • (0) Trackbacks