Many thanks to the lovely people at Thermaltake HQ for supplying the 11+ for testing.

The Volcano 11+ Xaser Edition (ok that's too much, v11+ from now on) is a big cooler. The box it came in is pretty massive by the standards set by its peers. It's also a very heavy cooler. But then 70x66x30 mm lumps of copper are going to weigh a bit. I can honestly say that when I got the thing out of the box I was pretty impressed. But looks alone don't cut it, the thing has to do its job. So does it?

Before we get into testing, a proper look at the thing. And the first thing we'll look at is the all important clip. Yes! Three holes! Clearly the industry is learning to oust those crappy old single-fitting clips that we all dispise so. This clip should give us a nice tight fit, and also exert a more even force on the cpu die. It will also prevent that horrible problem of snapping the middle lug off the cpu socket - it aint easy to replace those...

My first impression on looking the v11+ over was that it resembled a beefed up version of the Volcano 7+, a cooler which I had previously reviewed. Obviously that makes sense - the whole point of new products is to improve upon old designs. Unfortunately I no longer have my v7+ so I can't put them side by side. They certainly use the same design principles though. A large number of thin copper fins and a large, fast, fan atop them. The fan on the v7+ was only 70mm. The v11+ has a shroud around the sink which extends it's area to accomodate an 80mm fan. It's still as loud, if not louder, than the v7+ though.

On the subject of coolers the v11+ looks like, take a look at these.
The first one (left) is the Globalwin CAK4-88t. You can make out the similar thin copper finned design in the picture.
On the far right is the monstrous Thermalright SLK800. I've nothing to say about that fan other than that it's absolutely ridiculously big.
So we can see that this thin copper fin design is quite a popular one these days. For good reason? Well, hopefully we'll find that out.

As I mentioned earlier the v11+ is a big boy. The base measures 70x66 mm according to the specs on the back of the box. There were no issues installing it on my AK77-400MAX motherboard, and I don't see why there would be issues on any other boards. The base isn't very much bigger than the socket itself, and the size doesn't expand to 80mm until quite a distance from the board.
It doesn't feel very secure once it's in place - it can be rotated easily by hand. But the impression left by the arctic silver after a test fit convinced me that the heatsink and core are mating adequately well.

Fan noise is a really important factor to me. Aside from the fact that my psu is noisy as hell, I really don't like having loud fans in my case. Generally I run my 2 front fans at their "low" setting (which I assume to be around about 5V) and only have 1 additional fan at the rear of the case. I'm willing to put up with the psu fan because it's temperature controlled - I know it's only running so fast because of the extraordinary weather.

The rear of the rather fancy box states that the fan will produce noise of 17 dBA at it's low setting (1300 RPM) and 48 dBA at it's high setting (4800 RPM). 48 dBA is terribly loud... in my AK824cu review I used a table of noise levels... I think I may well have used incorrect data and so I won't be using it today. Rather I'll be more vague and try to explain with words instead of numbers. At low speed, the fan emits a barely audible hum. At full speed however it is very loud... say someone was vacuuming in the next room - it's about as noisy as that. Very distracting, and as far as I'm concerned unbearable. It sure gets the temps down though.

Now onto the cleverer aspects of the fan. I've been talking about low and high speeds, which is because the speed of the fan on the v11+ can be easily varied.

First up is the drive bay mounted speed dial, or the "X pattern" bay insert. As you may have guessed this is a knob mounted in a 5 1/4" drive bay insert. In my opinion it's ugly as hell but it all depends on taste. You might like it, and it also certainly depends on the case you're installing it in. Looks aside, the thing does its job well. You can hear the difference as you turn from low to high (you can definately hear it in high) and can even see the difference - the fan speed has a proufound effect on cpu temperature as we'll see later.
Next up to bat is the expansion slot bracket. Much more understated (very much so since you won't see it) and stylishly designed than the drive bay option, and with the advantage that it doesn't use up a drive bay (although depending on your case it might stop you using an expansion slot. In my case (spot the pun) it took up my last remaining slot. It wouldn't be difficult to mount elsewhere mind, with a spot of DIY.

Both of these use the same simple device (just a variable resistor I assume) and have plenty of wire to make the journey over to the v11+ in even the biggest of cases.

The third method of speed control is the cleverest. Bundled in the box with all these other fancy extras is a thin temperature probe (a thermistor?) which plugs into the fan to provide temperature controlled speed adjustment. The rear of the box states that the fan speed will sit at 1300 RPM (lowest) upto 20 degrees C, and then steadily rises upto 4800 RPM (full speed) at 55 degrees. I tested the temperature controlled setting (obviously) and it seemed to work pretty well. It got pretty loud though, I prefer to run a bit hotter with lower fan noise.

The package also includes a jumper that will keep the fan running at full speed all the time, if you wish to bypass all these funky control methods.

Lets get on with some tests now shall we? Temperatures are recorded by my motherboards onboard sensors via Motherboard Monitor 5. Fan speed will be varied and held at low and high speeds until the temperature settles and a reading will be taken. The test system is enclosed within a Lian Li PC60USB case, with 2 front 80mm fans and 1 rear 80mm exhaust. The Enermax psu has a 92mm and 80mm fan within, but I don't rate psus as efficient exhausts (especially this one, it gets pretty warm itself).

If you read my Akasa AK824cu review you'll know that during the testing of these units we (the good people of England) have been experiencing some unusually high temperatures. Well today my room is almost 30 degrees C, with the window wide open and curtains semi-drawn. It's pretty darn warm. The cpu has been running for most of the day at about 52 degrees C with the fan on the Volcano running at near it's lowest speed setting (at the point just below which I can hear it over my other fans).
Not brilliant, but not awful.

Using the expansion bracket speed controller I set the fan to full speed and temperature settled to 43 degrees C. A very good temperature, but at th sacrifice of my hearing. Setting the fan to low after a long period of having it at high makes a HUGE change. The room feels so peaceful and quiet... this may even be because the high speed setting has cooled the air sufficiently for the psu fan to slow down. I can't be sure though, it's probably just my mind playing tricks.
With the fan set to low the temperature slowly climbs. During this test, the temperature had climbed to 49 within just a couple of minutes. It settled out at 57 degrees C, higher than I like to see.
What I tend to do is increase the fan speed upto a point just before it becomes audible over the other fans in my system. In my case that's a point about a quarter of the way around. The temperature falls to a stable 50 degrees, much more acceptable and all the more impressive with the low fan noise (running at 2200 RPM)

Here's Motherboard Monitor's high/low readings:

All these results were taken with the CPU under full load constantly. There's no let up at all, UD keeps the cpu running at 100% all day (poor thing). Strangely enough if I give the thing a break, and close UD, the temperature doesn't budge. Weird as it sounds, the thing sits at 50 degrees with no variation. That's pretty impressive, although I'm not sure what it means... it would suggest to me that the heatsink is working pretty efficiently. Anyway, I'm more interested in load temps since that represents the maximum possible heat output.

Last week I tested the temperature controlled function. With room temperature at 25 degrees c, the machine booted into bios at 31 degrees cpu temp (2700 RPM fan speed). That rose at a negative exponential rate (is that right?), as in it the temperature increased steeply at first and then the rate of increase slowed. After 5 minutes in bios the reading was 38 (3100 RPM), and I then booted into windows. At 8 minutes, with windows fully loaded, the temperature read 39 degrees and the fan was running at 3200 RPM. The temperature increased slowly until it settled at 40 degrees after 12 minutes, with the fan running at 3276 RPM. What's interesting is that the fan had been running faster than that previously - I guess once it got to 40 degrees the fan needed to do less work to hold it there. All in all quite impressive, but unfortunately at this speed the fan was rather loud. I thought it was very loud, until I realised the girl on the other side of the street was vacuuming her car outside the window. Closing the window revealed that the fan was a bit quieter than I'd thought, but still very noticeable. The fan control was doing it's job though.

To test things further, I fired up Max Payne to get some load on the cpu (I wasn't running UD at the time so the above temps are all at idle or at least low cpu use). I decided to play MP for half an hour to check on the increase in temps and noise... it's a hard job I know, but someone's got to do it. The fan was already pretty noisy as I mentioned above, but the sound of automatic gunfire soon sorted that. After 30 minutes I quit the game and read the temperature - 44 degrees. Not bad, only a moderate increase. The fan speed had increased to 4066 RPM and was now very nopticeable. Almost intrusively loud. Just 1 minute later the temperature was unchanged but the fan had lowered speed to 3750 RPM. Another 4 minutes and the temperature fell to 42 (3668 RPM) where it stayed for good. The fan dropped off to 3552 RPM eventually, still quite loud. As we know from the precious test, the heatsink can hold 40 degrees at around 3200 RPM. But this test has shown that once the temperature increases, the fan will tend to hold temperature at the lowest speed possible. What might be preferable would be for the fan to run a little faster, to drop the temps, so it could eventually run slower at a stable temperature. Much later that night, the temperature had dropped to 41 degrees, at 3443 RPM. It never got back down to 40 though.

So the automatic speed control works, but could be seen as slightly flawed. The temperatures will never fall unless the fan speeds up, which means the fan cannot slow down (a catch-22?). Perhaps a little modification of the resistance of the thermistor would help, but really I think they have done the best job possible. To attain the best possible noise levels would require some quite clever system to monitor and control the fan speed. Thermaltake have done a good job of a simple speed control system which works well.

To conclude, I'd have to say Thermaltake have done a pretty good job with the "Volcano 11+ Xaser Edition", although they could do with taking a look at their naming policy. The v11+ performs pretty well at low speed settings, which should please people like me who are more bothered by noise than maximum overclocks, and can seriously shift some heat when running at high power, which conversely should please the speed freaks. However, being a jack of all trades generally means being slightly less effective at each job. There are coolers that will outperform the v11+ for the real speed freaks, and there are cheaper coolers that will do just as well as its bottom end performance for the noise concious. The AK824cu I just reviewed suits me better than the v11+, but I think there is definately a market for it. Those who want something a little flashier looking than the average, and also want to have the ability to turn their cooler into a real powerhouse need look no further. And I must admit that in this extreme weather, the ability to up the speed of the fan a little is a nice thing to have.

The v11+ is well made, good looking, and a fine performer. At £23 though it isn't cheap - the inclusion of so many extras must surely be a contributer to this high price so if you don't expect to use them you might think twice. The front speed controller isn't the most attractive thing in the world, but the expansion slot effort is a fantastic idea and well executed. The automatic control is also a nice idea - great if you want to leave the settings alone but don't want to risk overheating by leaving it on a slow setting. In winter I can see that coming into its own, but at this time of year it stays at the high end of fan speed all the time.

Looks good
Performs pretty well
Plenty of extras
Reasonable price (relative to many other coolers)
Very loud at full speed
Only average performance at low speed
Extras add [unnecessarily?] to cost
Only really worth the money for "power users"

Related:
Thermaltake website