---

Date: May 23rd, 2007
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Thermaltake USA
<--CLICK FOR DEALS ON A WATER COOLING SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES
<--CLICK FOR DEALS ON A WATER COOLING SYSTEM IN CANADA

 

PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING

Mounting the Volcano is a similar process for many types of CPUs and may or may not require removing the stock back plate on the motherboard. In my case I had to remove it since I will be using an AMD socket 754 chip for this review. The first step is to remove both the stock retention module and plastic plate on the back of the motherboard. Next I attached the included sponge and piece of Mylar to one of the metal “H” brackets and then stuck the whole pack to the underside of the motherboard. A long screw is then inserted on each side of the bracket.

 

 

 

 

After turning the motherboard over, a washer is slipped over each of the long screws and then a brass standoff secures each one in place. The Volcano is then placed over those two screws and a nut is used on each side to hold the heatsink in place. Thermaltake included a tool to help tighten the nuts down since it's a small space to work in.

With the Volcano installed and ready to go, let's see how it performs.

For testing, here's the system I used:

-A64 3200+ processor
-DFI Lanparty nF3 250 GB motherboard
-2 x 512Mb Patriot PC3200
-Radeon X800 XT PE
-2 x WD800JD in Raid 0
-NEC ND-3520A DVD-RW
-Lite-On XJ-HD166S DVD-ROM
-Antec 500W PSU

The conditions I used during testing are:

-Room temperature was kept at a constant 22C.
-Thermaltake Symphony Mini Liquid Cooling System is in place.
-Idle temps were recorded after the PC had been sitting for one hour under zero load.
-Load temps were recorded after two hours of torture testing with Prime95.
-Temps were recorded first at stock speed (2.2GHz) and then again after overclocked (2.5GHz).

Here are the temps with the stock waterblock included with the Symphony Mini:

 

And now the temps after installing the Volcano 4005:

 

As you can see, there's no improvement over the stock waterblock except for the load temps, and the improvement there is marginal at best. Thinking I had done something wrong during the install, I took everything apart and reinstalled the Volcano only to still get the same results. I was really hoping for a better improvement than this!