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Thermaltake CoolMod / Volcano 9 Heatsink Manufacturer: Thermaltake
Technology By Dean Barker (8/24/2002)
When I first saw this, I thought it was another neon strap on. Oh no, this most certainly is different. In fact, this is the first mod I have seen like this. Usually, the wild new idea like this comes from Joe User at 2am with a twelve pack of empty beer cans under the table, not a manufacturer. Who knows, maybe that still happened. Let me explain a bit. But before I do, we want to thank Thermaltake for sending over this nifty mod over to us to check out. From the picture below, you see what looks to be a Tt Volcano 9 with an extra piece of Plexiglas and some wires attached to the top. The Plexiglas and wires constitute the CoolMod.
I'm not going to get into the V9's performance as a heatsink, that is done in our review of it here. What the cool mod does is that two of the opposing neon lights on the sides of the plexi are blue and two are red. Each color is wired to a single connector. In the case of the blue, a three pin. With the red, a two pin. These plug into your mainboard's Power LED and HDD LED connectors respectively. You can see this below with our EPoX open test bed.
When your machine is powered up, the blue lamps are lit and as you access the hard drive the red will flash just as your normal HDD activity lamp does. Except this is much hipper! Let's fire er' up! Test Bed
In the left pic below are the blue lamps lit with the machine under power. To the right, is when it is accessing the hard drive.
When the hard drive was being thrashed about with the lamps reflecting off the plexi in rapid fire blink, I did let out more than a few ohhhs and ahhhhs. When the hard drive wasn't being accessed, the blue lights indicating the power is on, didn't do much as you can see. Actually, the pic gives them more credit than they deserve as they are dim above in a pic that was taken in complete dark, eight inches above the fan. I went back to the included instructions wondering if there just wasn't enough power going through the board to light these up sufficiently. The instructions referenced wiring the Power LED lamps directly to the power supply but stopped there. The Tt Website went into more depth stating that this is done via a "Dupond" three pin connector. Unfortunately, these were not included in our review pack. So I did what any self respecting person would do, I broke out my snips and an extra three pin cable and made an adapter line to connect the CoolMod "Power" lamps to the PSU. Unfortunately, when we powered things up both, blue lights gave the sudden flash of death signaling that they had died (or rather that I had killed them.) Conclusion The CoolMod idea really is a great one. I found myself defragging my drive over and over just to watch it flash. The power on blue lamps were a different story. Our test box's PSU was an Enermax 431 watt number which obviously is no slouch. No matter what we did (prior to cooking them) we couldn't get the blue lights equal to the red HDD activity ones on the CoolMod. The pictures on the Tt website seem to show the lights being of equal intensity. This unfortunately wasn't the case with our test unit. The other point about the CoolMod we weren't crazy about was all the wires. The V9 by itself has extra wires besides basic power lines. Add in four LEDs and all of a sudden you have something that looks a bit like a fork full of spaghetti. The CoolMod didn't lose much for this in that what else do you expect with four extra lights? Back to the blue light problem. Perhaps our unit had some issues, who knows. What I do know is that even with the problems we had, we still feel that the Tt CoolMod gets big points for its ingenuity and all round coolness.
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by R. Dean Barker.
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