Introduction
It’s hard to say no thanks to a 30mm RDA, even when you hadn’t planned to do any more vape reviews.
Product overview
The Tauren RDA Vortex 30 is (as the name implies) a 30mm dual-coil RDA.
What do you get?
- Tauren RDA Vortex 30
- 2×3.0mm 26g triple core fused claptons
- Coil measuring tool
- Squonk pin
- Tools/spares/etc
It would have been nice to get some cotton included, but the supplied coils are really nice, which more than makes up for a couple of pieces of cotton.
First impressions
It’s a 30mm RDA, so of course it’s big – personally I love the proportions of 30mm atomizers, they can get away with being tall enough to hold plenty of juice without looking strange.
The Vortex 30 is a little different, in that it’s a three-part design: one-piece top cap, deck and a solid metal inner chamber.
Having a one-piece top cap means that you rotate the entire cap to adjust the honeycomb airflow arrangement, with 84 airflow holes (42 on each side).
The postless deck has a very generous 10.5mm juice well that holds 2.5ml of juice, and has both slotted and under-coil airflow that is kept well away from the juice well.
The inner metal chamber takes the airflow from the side of the cap and down to the airflow on the deck, this also acts as a chamber condenser, which is held in place inside the top cap with an O-ring.
The airflow design on the deck combined with the inner metal chamber result in a deck that looks more like a 25mm RDA than a 30mm RDA – for me this is a good thing, 2×3.0mm coils fit with ease, you’d probably get 2×3.5mm coils if that’s what floats your boat – but condensed chambers usually result in excellent flavor – think of it as a 30mm Nitrous RDA and you’d be pretty close.
The build quality is good, everything feels solid and has precise machining – maybe a little too precise initially, because the first time you use it, it’s going to be hard to get apart – but after the first time and with a little juice on the O-rings, it’s smooth and easy to work with.
Styling
The overall styling is nice, mine was (by request) very purple. As previously mentioned the proportions are nice and while it does have an engraved logo, on mine and some other versions this is all one color, so you barely notice it – but I did have to search around for a mod that could take a 30mm atomizer without overhang.
It does come with a very low profile drip-tip that looks cool, but isn’t my preference so I swapped it out for something a little more practical.
Build
The coils are secured with hex screws, but if that’s not your preference regular flathead screws are included in the spares package.
The coil measuring tool is marked at 6mm, so I followed that, dropped the coils in, and secured them – it’s about as easy as it gets. I tried a few positions and generally got better flavor when my coils were closer to the airflow slots.
Wicking is simple, I cut my wicks in line with the first O-ring on the deck, fluffed them and dropped them in, I wasn’t planning on squonking so I didn’t thin them too much.
Airflow
When rotating the top cap to adjust the airflow, it won’t rotate further than fully open/close and if you turn it when fully closed you can remove the RDA from your mod.
You don’t have to think about aligning the airflow to hit the center of your coils, the air goes into the honeycomb on the cap, through the chamber insert and then into the airflow on the deck, so no matter the position of the cap, it’s always going to hit all of the coil.
Airflow goes from very open and airy to much tighter than you’d ever need for a dual-coil RDA – basically it’s got you covered whatever your preferences are.
How does it perform?
First build – supplied 2×3.0mm 26g triple core fused claptons this build came to 0.11ohms for the pair. Fully open you need 90-100w to get the best out of these reasonably fat coils, however once you take the airflow down to 50% you can vape it at 75-85w for excellent flavor.
Second build - 2×3.0mm 28g dual-core fused claptons this build came to 0.18ohms for the pair. This build performed in a very similarly to most 25mm dual-coil RDAs, fully open from 75-85w gave a nice but airy vape, cutting the airflow down to 50% gives a nice saturated vape at 65-75w.
Overall, the performance was very good and gives a lot of options – you can put fat coils in, open it up and treat it as a high power cloud machine, you can put smaller coils in, close it up and go dual-coil flavor chasing and everything in between.
It manages heat reasonably well. When chain-vaping it at 90-100w, there was a little warmth but nothing uncomfortable.
To drip or squonk?
I don’t own a dual battery squonk mod, so this was purely dripping for me – the RDA suits dripping very well, you can dump a lot of juice down the drip-tip without any concerns due to the 2.5ml juice capacity.
Conclusion
This is probably the best dual-coil RDA that I’ve used. The combination of a really deep juice-well, chamber condenser and versatile airflow gives a lot of flexibility and it looks really good.
The only negatives that I can think of are that the supplied drip-tip isn’t that practical and that it’s going to look silly if your mod isn’t designed for 30mm atomizers.
Disclaimer
The Tauren RDA Vortex 30 was supplied for the purposes of this review by ThunderHead Creations, who were kind enough to provide and discount code that will save 20%: TH30
. A well written review, and lots of information.