Styling

To begin, the look and feel of these heatsinks is excellent. You can tell a lot about a product by the care taken in packaging and also in the finish of a product. These two heatsinks have very nice finish.  The all copper Tundra2 features a clear, quiet, yet effective oversized fan delivered great performance.  The  aluminum Avalanche with copper insert, and a mean looking 11 fin fan performed equally as well.

Installation

Installation was one of the marks that would not get user friendly marks.  The clips are designed so you stick a screw driver into the slot and snap the heatsink in place.  It is my opinion that is you ever slip, your motherboard is going to go down hill real fast after you scratch those traces. It would be preferable to have larger tabs to assist in installation.

Having said that, the springs are quite tight and hold the heatsink in place very well. The Tundra 2 comes with generic thermal grease, while the Avalanche comes with a pre-installed thermal pad, which was scraped off immediately (those pads are never effective) for better performing thermal grease

Noise

Both the Tundra2 and Avalanche had impressively low noise output. With fans producing around 4500 RPM, AVC has apparently given thought to the balance between high performance on mind numbing noise. When installing the Tundra 2; however, the fins did get bent during installation which caused a rattling effect when the air flowed over them.  A short investigation resolved the problem. 

*Care must be taken when installing an all copper heatsink.  Copper is VERY soft and bends easily.

The Testing Platform

The testing platform is an AMD XP2000, on a Soyo DRAGON Ultra, with 512 Mb of DDR PC2700 (333 Mhz).  Please note that the case this is mounted in a Kingwin KT-436 case View it here!.  This case has six fans to increase airflow through the case. In addition, custom folded cabling has been utilized to prevent airflow blockages. This is to say that performance could differ from application to application.