OCZ Gladiator 3 and Thermaltake Volcano 12 Heatsinks Review Author: Alan Wong Date Posted: December 26th, 2003 OCZ Gladiator 3 (Black Fan Version) SLRating: OCZ Gladiator 3 (LED Fan Version) SLRating: Thermaltake Volcano 12 Heatsinks SLRating: Bottom Line: With lots of cooling fans to choose from its important to get it right as CPU’s demand better cooling to keep up with the excess temperature from overclocking. We evaluated cooling fans from OCZ and Thermaltake, performance varied and so did noise, read on to discover what we found in our official review........ Article Navigation Introduction Thermaltake Volcano 12 OCZ Gladiator 3 Test Setup Performance Noise Conclusions Thermaltake Volcano 12 OCZ Gladiator 3 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 >> Discuss This Article

OCZ Gladiator 3

The Gladiator 3 is more of a simple heatsink fan. It is small and therefore there are no worries about it being to big for it to not fit on your motherboard. The only tradeoff with its small size is that it would mean that the size of the heatsink itself is small and in general, the bigger the heatsink, the better it cools (and the smaller the heatsink, the lower the performance). There was no fan speed controller included, unlike the Volcano 12. It really wasn’t nesccesary anyways, since both the LED Fan and Silent Fan version of the Gladiator 3 are quiet. It was quite disappointing to only find the heatsink fan and some thermal compound in the box and nothing else. OCZ tends to not include instructions for their products and users who don’t know how to install a heatsink onto their CPU may have to look online for guides on how to do so. This was quite disappointing since Thermaltake was able to include instructions while OCZ was not.

1 Gladiator 3 Heatsink Fan (either LED Fan or Black Quiet Fan)

1 Small Bag Thermal Compound

The Gladiator comes in two versions: one with a LED fan and one with a black fan (which is more quiet than the LED Fan). Both are 60mm in diameter, which means that the fans are very small and are the same size as the AMD Stock coolers, at least diameter wise. When using the LED Fan, I found the colors to be quite solid but not fitting for modders, since the Tri-Color would look weird among the other uniformed color theme that most modders have in their case (e.g. blue LED case fanes, blue cathode lights, blue EL wire, blue UV ATA cables, etc), however that is just my opinion. Nonetheless, the colors emitting from the fan is solid and strong. Both fans were quiet but the black fan produced practically no sound while the LED fan produced a very small amount of sound. All in all, they are very silent and since they make very little sound, I would recommend getting the LED fan instead of the black one, since the LED fan cools better (as you will see in the Performance section of the review). The LED fan is powered by a 3-pin conector that connects to the motherboard whereas the black silent fan uses a molex connector and is powered by the power supply directly. The black fan’s speed, unfortunately, cannot be monitored by the motherboard since it does not use a 3-pin connector.

Unlike the Thermaltake Volcano 12, the OCZ Gladiator 3 has a very smooth and shiny copper base. A clear reflection could be seen on the surface when placing a dime in front of it. I did notice some scratches on the surface, but that is really nothing to worry about, since it wouldn’t affect performance (the thermal compound would fill the microscopic valley that the scratches created).

The fins are of single piece construction and are made of copper. There are 40 fins on each side of the heatsink. The fins were somewhat thicker than those of the Volcano 12’s, but not as numerous.

Installing the Gladiator was simple and easy. Both sides of the clip were "flexible" unlike the Volcano 12, where one side of the clip could not be moved horizontally. All I had to do was secure one side of the clip to the socket, and then secure the other side. Afterwards I just had to plug in the fan to the motherboard (or power supply, depending on which fan you are using) and everything was done.

Test Setup

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Article Navigation Introduction Thermaltake Volcano 12 OCZ Gladiator 3 Test Setup Performance/Noise Conclusions

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