Product: Vantec Tornado Case Fans Application: Case Cooling Provided by: Vantec Review by: Scott Review date: June 7th, 2002

     Vantec, the authority in cooling, has an incredible new product out for the Overclocker called the Tornado Case Fan. In the past, Vantec has concentrated on quiet performance. Now the gloves come off and Vantec goes all out with the most powerful fans they can find! As of right now, the Tornado fans come in two versions, an 80mm model and a 93mm model called the TD8038H and TD9238H respectively.

     So what separates these fans from the pack? How about an incredible 84.1 cubic feet per minute of air flow for the 80mm fan and a Texas tornado blasting 119cfm of air for the 92mm! Holy crap! With a couple of these placed strategically in my case, they just might suck my heatsink right off my CPU and grind it into little bits spewing little chunks of copper all over my office! Okay, maybe not, but 119cfm is a lot of air flow. Check out these specs!

Testing

     Okay, with that much air flow I would expect these fans to sound like a Boeing 747 on take off. Well guess what, they do! At over 55 decibels per fan, these monsters will wake the family and piss off the neighbors. Oh well, it's worth the cooling power right? Let's see what these babies can do!

     I installed the 80mm bad boy in my main system which is a Lian Li PC60 housing an AthlonXP 1800+ and GeForce3. I have pretty decent cooling already, but with the 80mm Tornado I was able to drop my case temperature by over 10° Fahrenheit which puts the inside temperature of my case right at room temperature. With that much air blasting through my case, my CPU temperatures dropped about 5° F (depending on the load) and my video card registered slightly over case temperature!

Conclusion

     The performance of Vantec's Tornado fans are incredible...and so is the sound. Unfortunately, massive air flow has it's downfall and the noise is just something many can't live with. For those of you who don't care about sound, these fans are just the thing you need. But those of you who don't like a noisy PC, don't  turn your back on these fans. These fans would be my #1 choice to use in conjunction with a rheostat. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a rheostat is a controller that allows the user to adjust the power going to the fan which in turn lowers or raises the speed of the fan thus lowering or raising the sound. These devices can be found over at CrazyPC.

     The Vantec Tornado fans are a great product worth your time and money. Vantec has also given the consumer all they will need to mount these fans. Not only do they come with a metal finger guard preinstalled along with mounting screws, but they also come with a 3-pin connector to hook to your motherboard for fan monitoring and a heavy duty 4-pin connector for power. The Tornado fans are a prime example of how all case fans should be sold, as a complete kit ready to be installed.