Review

Vigor Monsoon II Review
by Thomas Gribble

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Features

To be fair, Vigor Gaming did not actually ¡§make¡¨ the Monsoon II Cooler. A company called MACS (Micro Air Conditioning System) Technology did. The Monsoon II is giant tower-style heatsink with a 92mm fan, a 12V thermoelectric cooling plate, and 4 heatpipes. The base of the Monsoon II is constructed out of nickel-plated copper, while the convection fins are entirely aluminum. This is a commonly used design among tower-style CPU coolers, including the Termaltake Big Typhoon that we will be testing the Monsoon II against. The Monsoon II also comes with its own ¡§Management unit¡¨ that occupies a 5.25¡¨ bay. The unit consists of two buttons - one which toggles between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and another which changes the display color - and an LCD display that shows the temperature reading from the thermistor on the cooler, the total number of hours the system has been operating since being installed, and the current system uptime. There is also a picture of a dude shoveling some dirt which means the cooler is working.

All of these features make for a pretty decent heatsink, but what makes this cooler stand out is the implementation of a 12V Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC). To save the trouble of re-writing the whole theory behind TEC technology, here is an excerpt from the TEC section of our "Fundamentals of Cooling" article:

"The third type of cooling is pretty weird, so bear with me. Peltier cooling is based on something called the Thermoelectric Effect. In 1821, a physicist named Thomas Johann Seebeck discovered the presence of an electrical charge in a metal rod when the ends of the rod were at different temperatures. This effect was studied and eventually quantified into equations and applications (thermocouples). It is the ability of this effect to work in reverse, as discovered in 1834 by Jean Peltier, which actually has applications in cooling. Peltier discovered that if a current was passed through two different metals at two different junctions, then heat variation within the metals occurs. This came to be known as the Peltier Effect, but it's more commonly referred to as the all-encompassing "Thermoelectric Effect."

From Thermoelectric Effect we get something called a Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) that can be used to cool all sorts of things, most pointedly the heat-producing microprocessors in your computer. Without getting too technical, a TEC is basically a flat plate comprised of different metals that sits in between your processor and heatsink.

Current runs through the plate and allows its underside (the part that contacts the processor) to transfer heat to the other side of the plate at a very fast rate. This allows the contact side to be very cool, often times in the 10C range. Depending on certain characteristics of the rest of the cooling components, and the ambient temperature, Peltier coolers can be either extremely beneficial, or a total waste of money. The ideal scenario for a Peltier cooler is making contact with a heatsink that has very low thermal resistivity (R). This allows the heat to be transferred from the heated side of the plate instead of bogging down and consequently reducing the overall effectiveness of such an ungainly setup."

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