Hey guys.. I recently ordered some stuff from OCSystem.com, specifically the ThermalTake Volcano 9 "Coolmod" CPU Heatsink/Fan, and the ThermalTake "CoolMod" GF4 Copper heatsink/Fan; I figured I'd share my experiences with them over the past week. For those of you who are impatient and just want to know if they're any good, I'll say it right now: in my opinion, both of these products *rock*.

First, let's hit the Volcano 9. This thing is massive. I have an Athlon XP 2200+, and up until last week it was using the stock heatsink and fan that came with it when I ordered it. Without any overclocking, my processor would generally run at over 150 deg. F. As I'm sure you know, this isn't really acceptable. I know AMD's run hot, but... damn. So I finally decided to get something new to cool my proc down a bit. Sure, I'd love to do watercooling, but that's too big an investment for me right now, so new heatsink/fans will have to do. I got the TT Volcano 9, and the results were very nice.

Let's focus on looks before I get to performance (you allready know I'm gonna tell you performance is great anyway). This heatsink and fan are absolutely massive, nearly double the size/weight of the stock HS/F I had before. They just *felt* beefy. With a thick copper plug and massive amounts of aluminum around it, you can just tell this heatsink will take whatever flaming processor you throw at it. The fan is also a fairly massive affair, with an orange color that I wasn't terribly fond of at first, but I suppose it beats plain old black. In any case, with the lights of and the LED's on it turned on and flashing, you barely notice the color.

That's right, this thing brings some LED's built in, and that's where the 'Coolmod' bit comes from. It's got two blue LED's (top and bottom) and two red LED's (on the sides). The idea behind these LED's is that they hook up to the Power (blue) and HDD (red) LED plugs on your mobo. The advantage of this is that while the blue LED's are always on, the red LED's flash and throb on and off to the rhythm of your Hard Drive, which is an amazingly cool effect, sort of gives your computer a 'heartbeat' as the CPU seems to throb on and off while you use it. The main disadvantage here is that you can't plug in the Power and HDD indicator LED's on the front of your case at the same time as the ones on the Volcano 9, so they get sacrificed. It's up to you to decide wether the coolness factor of the throbbing CPU is worth the sacrifice of your regular case-front LED's. In my case, my mobo (an MSI KT7 Ultra 2) has two connectors for Power LED's, so I was able to hook up both the Volcano 9 and the briliant blue Power LED I've got on the front of my case. And though I *was* force to sacrifice my front HDD LED, the throbbing CPU effect is massively cooler, so it was a sacrifice I gladly made. The other main drawback is that it will definetly add to the cable clutter in your case. The wiring is a bit of a mess, and will take some cleverness to be able to route it across your motherboard and towards the LED power sockets without impacting the look of yoru setup much. However, despite these drawbacks, I feel that for the sheer 'looks' factor, it's worth the hassle. And once hooked up, again, this thing looks incredibly cool in action.

Okay, now that I've drooled over looks, how's the performance on this thing? Well, the Volcano 9 is an interesting beast. Its fan can be set to operate in 3 different modes. The first one is what I call 'screamer' mode. You simply set the fan to run at maximum RPM's, all the time. The cooling in this mode is absolutely excellent. Whereas my CPU previously ran at over 150 deg. F even when idle, the TT V9 at full blast makes it run at around 115-120 deg. F. when idle, and I haven't seen it jump past 127 deg. F. even during a prolonged full load (I should state that I'm using Artic Silver 3 and a Copper Shim on my CPU as well). The main drawback to 'screamer' mode is, of course, noise. It sounds like you stuck a hairdryer inside your case when it's going at full blast. I mean, this thing will scare the neighbor's cat! It may have something to do with the fan going at nearly 5500 rpms (the box says that the fan is rated to run at 4800 when at full speed, but MBM 5 tells a different story). Of course, turning on Winamp and turning up the Slipknot drowns out the fan quite nicely, but this may not be an ideal solution for everyone.

The second is what I like to call 'manual' mode. You hook up a little switch (included) to the fan, and run it out through the back/side/top/wherever of your case. This switch allows you to change the fan to any one of three different speeds. The first speed, of course, is 'full', with all the noise but excellent cooling that entails. The second is medium, which is supposed to be somewhere around 3000 rpms (I'm writing this during slow time at work, so I don't have my numbers with me), and makes almost all the noise go away (or maybe it just seems like it after the massive sensory assault of 'screamer' mode). Cooling is quite acceptable in this mode, not as impressive as in full speed mode, but it will do for regular work or even light short bursts of gaming. However, I wouldn't trust it to keep the CPU very cool for extended amounts of time at full load. The last mode is 'light', and lowers the fan to around 1300 rpms. Cooling is most definetly not acceptable for anything more strenuous than working on notepad or downloading random files in this mode, however, if you sleep with your PC in the room and like to leave it on at night downloading cookie recipes or fabric patterns (seriously, what else do people use P2P networks for? ), this mode will at least keep your PC from locking up on you overnight while virtually eliminating all noise. Just be sure you turn it back up to either of the other two modes before you turn on your FPS of choice in the morning!

The last mode involves a thermal sensor (also included). ThermalTake reccomends attatching it to the back of the CPU itself, but this can be tricky, and despite the thinness of the wires leading out from the sensor, it still feels weird plugging the CPU back in and making sure you've routed the little wires correctly around those tiny CPU pins. Other people have reported good results by simply putting the sensor on the bit of exposed copper near the middle of the top of the heatsink itself, so you may not have to put the sensor on your CPU after all. the results on this are mixed. The sensor regulates the speed of the fan, making it work harder when the CPU heats up, and slow down when it cools off. Performance is middle of the road here, with a decent balance between noise and temperature. Your CPU will run from 5 to 10 degrees hotter depending on load on average (though when it heats up, as in gaming, the fan will kick in full blast and cool it down quite a bit), but the noise level is most definetly kept under control.

It' s really up to you to decide which of the three modes you want to deal with. In any of them, however, performance is generally excellent. Despite some noise and messy cabling issues, the TT Volcano 9 is a very impressive looking, and nicely performing, piece of hardware, and I'd definetly reccomend it to anyone looking to spruce up their CPU's performance *and* looks.

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Whooo! and now to the second part: the TT GF4 "CoolMod" HS/F. Dont' worry, this one will be much shorter. Background: I've got a PNY GF4 Ti42000 64Mb card. It's purple. The stock cooler on this card, however, is pure rubbish. As soon as you start pushing the card, it begins to overheat, and stability and graphic quality suffers very noticeably, with regular crashes and nasty artifacts onscreen in the two games I've been playing most recently: Neverwinter Nights and Jedi Kinght II: Jedi Outcast. It was time to do something about this.

The TT GF4 cooler is a nice, solid piece of pure copper. Perfectly designed for the GF4 cards, you can attach it easily with the two pushpins it brings. I pulled out the old heatsink, wiped the chip clean, poured on the Artic Silver, and plugged in the TT. First problem: the power connectors for the fan and the LED (this one's a 'Coolmod' too, it brings a very bright blue LED that looks very,v eyr cool.. no throbing, though) don't go into the power output built into the card itself. I had to do some more cable routing to hook these up to the main PSU with some Molex adapters (included with the HS/F. (NOTE: This HS/F also brings some Copper-coated tin RAM heatsinks and frag tape to attach them. They didn't seem to be any beefier than the RAM heatsinks my card allready had, so I deicded they werent worth the trouble it would tak to install them).

Despite this minor setback, after some creative cabling, I was set to go. I plugged everything in, turned on my system, and got ready to game. First impression was that the card looked very cool in there with the blue LED reflecting all over the clear acrylic casing of the HS/F. Definetly a plus there. But would it improve my gaming stability? Short answer: yes. When installing it, I could definetly feel the difference in weight and mass between the stock aluminum HS/F that came with the card, and the TT one. And when it came to performance, it showed its colors very nicely. I booted up JK2:JO, and 4 hours later, I noticed it had run flawlessly, not a single crash, not a single artifact onscreen, with 1024x768 resolution and 2x antialiasing. The heatsink was most definetly doing its job. Unfortunately, I didn't really have a way of measuring specific tems on my video card, but from the experience of having constant crashes and artifacts thanks to overheating before, and now perfect stability and performance with presumably stable temps with this new heatsink, I'm gonna go ahead and estimate previous temperature as 'Too Damn Hot', and current temperature as 'Frosty'.

To review, this HS/F definetly made a serious difference in the performance and stability of my card. If you have any problems with your card overheating and games crashing out or looking fugly (and you know it's not your RAM), I'd definetly say to give this product a try.

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Well that's it, i'm done playing reviewer for the day. Comments ae more than welcome, and if anyone's played with either of these products as well, let me know how it went for you.

Kat, I guess some of you just don't read what myself, and others keep telling everyone.

It sounds like you like this, and I don't see why except that this was an improvement from your previous experience.

This is going to sound a little harsh, but I have that same fan running at medium speed on my Thermalright SLK-800 and my load temps top at 43C - 45C and idle at 39C. You have to run the same fan at highest speed to get the same results.

We have told guys over and over again, Swiftech, Alpha, and Thermalright. These are the performance heatsinks and you own one of the hottest running AMD chips made so this is something that you should have picked up on.

Now not only do I constantly still here Chiquita saying how great a Volcano9 is, your here saying the same thing but the numbers don't support it.

Like I say, it is understandable that you would be happy given your previous situation. But had you just listened to BA, Scapegoat, Putwig, and myself, then you would be in an even better situation then you are now.

If you didn't happen to catch the recommendations in the other topics, then I am sorry, and wish you had asked us what to get. If you did, and ignored it, oh well, not much we can do about that.

Thermaltake is crap pal, the only things they make that are satisfactory, are the chipset/agpset coolers.

I recently made a huge mistake buying a Thermaltake p4 dragon orb and it looked great and all...but my P.O.S. galaxytech cooler had an idle of 22c, and it went up to 40c with that thermal*crap*take, not to mention blowing my ears out for the 2 hours I kept it on my precious P4.

You may think I put it on incorrectly but that was not so as It looked correct to me and a few buddys as we laughed as the temps rose higher.
Thermaltake never again. Thanks to lcpiper here I am buying the top of the line Swiftech MCX4000.
.If you can still return that V9 do it, and pick up A swiftech MCX462 or if your on a budget consults the pros like Lcpiper and BA here on PR for cheap and effective solutions for cooling...and just about everything else

Hey Kat, I have been thinking this over and although I feel that you can only expect marginal performance out of your heatsink, that doesn't mean that we can't help you make things better.

I don't like just giving you a hit and saying "tough luck dude", that is really not my style, so I want to try and see if we can help you with your case cooling in order to improve your overall cooling situation.

Can you please give us all the details about your case cooling setup:
What fans you have for intakes and where they are, the same for any exhausts fans, and what PSU you have ?

It is possible that we can spot a problem in your case cooling that can be easily and cheaply corrected so that you will get better performance overall.

I use the TT GF4 cooler also and noticed an improvement in overclocking. But, I'm preparing to slap a waterblock on it and see what happens.

lcpiper: Thanks for the tips, I'm just going with my current experiences, and, frankly, I will admit that I bought the fans more based on looks than performance.. I'm a sucker for lights. but don't worry, I'm always open for reccomendations and I'lm willing to listen to advice.. my setup works for me well enough, at least, but I know it's not that much to brag about, but it keeps me happy and fiddling around in there. Anyway, I'm @ work right now and it's gotten busier so I don't have time to run down my whole setup for critiquing yet.. I'll be sure to post it up this afternoon around 6-7 pm ESt when I get home so you can give me any tips. I could possibly put up some pics too, I've got a serious rat's nest of power cables in there which I've just been too lazy to find a decent way to route them out of sight. And don't worry, I take criticism well..

Sounds cool Kat. If there is a way that the guys and I can help you out, we will find it

j0, I'm finally home. Allright, let's get down to the nitty gritty, as it were:

System Specs:
AMD Athlon 2200+ (no OC at the moment)
512 MB PC2100 DDR RAM (1 stick Kingston, 1 stick Sky.. I know, I know.. I'll buy Corsair or some better brand when I get around to upgrading to PC2700)
MSI KT7 Ultra 2 Motherboard w/ RAID & USB 2.0
A couple of no-name NICs
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
PNY GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64 MB
20 GB 5400 rpm noname hard disk (one of the holdovers from the days when this machine was a Gateway Athlon 950Mhz)
8x4x32x CD-RW drive (the other holdover..)
PSU: noname 400W (1 fan, fairly quiet)
... and a floppy.

And now for fans and eye-candy (including the case):
Case: functionally equivalent to the Xoxide X300 super Mid Tower, with a slightly different side-window.
Fans:2 noname 80mm black fans mounted on the front of the case blowing over the hard drive (intake). 2 Antec 80mm Tri-lights mounted on the back (intake). 1 noname 80mm clear fan in the middle of the case window on the side (exhaust).
Heatsink/Fans: CPU: ThermalTake Volcano 9 "CoolMod". Video Card: ThermalTake GF4 Copper Coolmod cooler, strock ramsinks. Northbridge: stock MSI clear fan.
Lights (besides the ones on the fans, CPU heatsink.fan, and Video Card Heatsink/Fan): 1 blue sound reactive cold cathode (again, noname).
EIO.com 4x20 LCD screen, jury-rig mounted on a CrystalFontz bracket (planning to possibly upgrade to a real CrystalFontz LCD later for this rig and use the EIO LCD for a pet project of some kind, but that would be much later. The LCD Parallel cable is routed behind the motherboard pan, doesn't get in the way of anything or impede airflow much.)

Stuff that's on the way:
2 rounded silver IDE cables and 1 rounded silver floppy cable from Xoxide.

I'll see what I can do about maybe posting some pics later, but in the meantime let me know what other info you need from me.

Here is part of your problem:

Quote: 2 Antec 80mm Tri-lights mounted on the back (intake). 1 noname 80mm clear fan in the middle of the case window on the side (exhaust).

The two rear fans should exhaust and the side fam should intake.

That will give you three in, and three out, and the rear fans won't be trading hot air with the PSU.

It will also smooth out you airflow and reduce turbulance as all the exhausts will be located in one basic area.

This should help your case temp a lot, and therefore help your CPU cooling.

Gotcha, I'll try doing that switcharound a little bit later tonight and keep an eye on my temps then. thanks for the tip. Anything else you wanna throw my way, let me know. I just started doing this a few months ago and have gotten more seriously into it only very recently, so I'm still quite a bit of a n00b in this. but I'm willing to learn. Someday, oh yes, someday I will build my Hamsterb0x out of one of those huge old tower cases.. (the main gimmick involves hooking up a generator to the hamster wheel and having various LED's or some other sort of light respond when the little critter spins on the wheel.. I'm a fan of crazy mods. )

Okay I can admit the Volcano 9 isn't the BEST, but its pretty damn good for the price your paying. It keeps my 1800+ T-Bred at almost room temperature on LOW RPM (1300RPM) so I'm not complaining .

IcPiper, whats a reputable company that'll sell me a SLK-800 and have it to me under a week?

Your local computer store .

Katsushiro do you really expect us to read all of that. I got bored after the first 2 paragraphs man. .

My local computer store only carries a Volcano 9 and some assorted Coolermaster HSF's. Maybe I'll just have them special order one for me.

Got called out on a trouble ticket. sry.

Let's see, in order of appearance;

Kat, sounds cool, looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Chiquita, I know you like your V9. You have a lot in common with Santa Clause, you both like the V9, and you both life at the North Pole fer' chris sakes

Outcast, the best I know is Newegg.com, FrozenCPU is a sponsor of ours and sometimes has better prices, I haven't heard of any problems with them from the guys here. But you can check reseller-ratings.com for more info on them.

Chiquita, I read it all, he was looking for help

Hey all. lcpiper, again, thanks for the tips. Haven't gotten to deal with the fans yet.. got carried away gaming, you know how it is. I'll be dealign with it tomorrow and seeing how the temps measure up afterwards. As fot rh Hamsterb0x, it's sort of a pipe dream right now, but since I work at a computer repair shop (I don't actually do computer repair, I do programming, but we're sharing offices), they occasionally bring in, and put out of their misery, ancient machines and some *huge* old tower cases. If one of those old tower cases gets left in the trash anytime soon, I'm claiming it for me and definetly seeing if I can pull outthe Hamsterb0x then.. until then, it's just something to snicker at in my mind's eye.

And Chiquita, I understand, don't worry, I wasn't exactly expecting all of PR to turn out and read my rant-cum-review. I tend to get carried away and wordy, as you can see. And hey, at least *someone* read it all. I only suxx0r a little.

And on a totally unrelated note: stopped by w00tornot.com...great fun. Full w00t on that idea.

Quote: IcPiper, whats a reputable company that'll sell me a SLK-800 and have it to me under a week?

Outcast, the cheapest ive seen the SLK-800 is at SVC Compucycle 29.99 W/O the fan, thats about 10 bucks cheaper than every place ive checked, ive used them a few times and they are pretty good and ship fast.