Thermaltake Volcano 11+ Review

The Thermaltake Volcano 11+ Xaser Edition is really a very unique heatsink that has been improved from previous designs to make it more useful and user friendly. One of its major strong points is the 80mm "smart" fan. (a term that I coined for this review) The fan can either be thermally controlled by temperatures sampled from the underside of the processor or, manually controlled by either one of the two included dials. There is also the full speed feature, which is just like turning the dial all the way up, without the dial. .

The thermal probe is very responsive, though since the heatsink had a little trouble keeping the processor below 40C I wasn't able to witness anything more than the fan slowly speeding up as the system booted to windows. The dials worked as expected and much to my surprise the full speed mode kicked in without having to use the included jumper.

As seen in previous bonded fin heatsink designs the C/W rating is rather high which doesn't make the Volcano 11+ a very overclocker friendly heatsink. It does however make for a great mainstream cooler provided that you have good adequate case cooling and use lower power processors if you intend to overclock.

In the photos above you will see the Thermaltake ducting mod on a Volcano 11+ with a high-speed 80x80x35mm fan affixed atop. The idea behind this duct is to provide a more even flow of air to the heatsink and avoid the cone of dead air located directly under the cooling fan. The only drawback to this mod is that it adds a certain degree of stress to the system board and processor. The ducting mod moves the fan further away from the heatsink thus multiplying the weight of the fan on the CPU socket. This isn't something that I would recommend if you plan to move your computer often.

Lightweight copper heatsink
Stable 3 prong mounting clip
Thermally controlled 80mm fan
Variable speed fan controls

Average cooling performance
Immovable mounting clip difficult to install

I would like to thank Thermaltake for helping to make this review possible.