Thunderhead Creations have been prominent in the vape scene for quite a few years now, largely catering to the rebuildable and mech mod markets, and I’ve had several of their atomisers (mostly RTAs) over that time. They recently got in touch and asked if I’d care to take a look at their upcoming RDA, the Tauren Vortex 30, which I was more than happy to do with my previous experience with their gear.
Specifications
- 30mm diameter
- Dual coil RDA
- Top down “3D Vortex” airflow
- 10.5mm juice well with 2.5ml capacity
- Squonk pin included

The Tauren Vortex 30 is available in six colours and I chose the gunmetal edition for review. Inside the box you get the Tauren Vortex 30 RDA, a pair of premade coils (nichrome), squonk pin, two Allen keys, a bunch of spare O-rings and grub screws, and finally a brief user guide.

As the name would suggest, the Tauren Vortex 30 is 30mm in diameter which is on the larger side, it’s only 29.5mm tall though and that’s including the included 810 drip tip so it looks quite well proportioned. There’s a bold Tauren logo on one side and honeycomb airflow intakes on either side.

The Tauren Vortex 30 has a three part design with a solid top cap and standard 810 drip tip which sits over the build deck and inner airflow chamber.

Rather than having the typical barrel and airflow adjustment arrangement the airflow chamber sits on top of the build deck directing the airflow from the 84 honeycomb air inlets (42 on each side) of the top cap down towards the internal airflow on the build deck.

This has a locking system where the small lug on the underside of the top cap runs along the groove in the top of the inner airflow chamber and this provides hard stops on the fully open and fully closed positions. It’s also helpful when removing Tauren Vortex 30 from a mod as you can use the fully closed position to help you unscrew the RDA.
When you remove the top cap the inner chamber stays locked in place inside the top cap and on initial unboxing this proved to be more than a little difficult to remove (as did the drip tip). A quick lubrication of the O-rings with a little eliquid soon solved this though.

Out of the box, a solid positive pin is fitted but a squonk pin is included in the spares bag. This is easy enough to swap out with one of the included Allen keys, but do bear in mind that the positive post will be loose as you do this, it’s easy enough to reposition though. Both pins protrude away from the threads and the peek insulators look sturdy enough, so I’d call this a hybrid safe design, good luck finding a 30mm diameter squonk mod though as that’s a rare beast indeed, so I ended up using this as a dripper.

The build deck has a postless design with what Thunderhead Creations call a “3D Vortex” airflow with airflow being directed from the sides of the coils as well as the underneath. The airflow chamber sits over the top of this directing the airflow towards the centre, and this means the actual build chamber is quite a bit smaller than you might expect from such a large RDA. This isn’t restrictive as there’s still plenty of room for quite large complex coils and the condensed chamber size also means that the flavour shouldn’t get washed out which is something I’ve experienced with super-sized atomisers in the past.

The suggested leg length on the included coil trimming tool is 6mm so I went with that and the postless design made installing the coils a breeze. All that remained once the grub screws were tightened down was to straighten the coils out and give things a quick dry burn to work out any hotspots on the coils, bear in mind that the included coils are Nichrome so they’re not suitable if you’re nickel sensitive like myself.

The drip well here is a massive 10mm deep, so you’ll need to cut your wicks quite long. I cut mine in a slight diamond pattern, so I didn’t feel like I was overpacking the juice wells allowing me to keep the wicks nice and fluffy. This has a quoted capacity of 2.5ml but I swear it felt like a lot more than that on my initial drip as the wicks just kept drinking the liquid up! With everything set up I could now begin testing in earnest…
Initially I had this on a mod with an internal lipo but with the 0.1 ohm build and fairly airy draw, the 80 watts on tap simply wasn’t enough so I had to swap over to a dual 18650 setup. Things came alive at around 100 watts although this was still quite a cool vape… I don’t think the mentholated e-liquid I was using helped here either as I got an instant brain freeze!
Things warmed up slightly at around 120 watts with the airflow just closed off a fraction with excellent flavour… I ditched the mentholated e-liquid though, that was definitely a bad move. With those large juice wells, you won’t find yourself dripping constantly unless you go mental on the power on the top down airflow means that this is relatively difficult to over drip or over squonk.
Although the top cap doesn’t get warm with repeated drags, I almost immediately took a dislike to the super stubby 810 drip tip included in the box, it simply didn’t feel comfortable at all so you might want to swap this out with something a little taller like I did.
Conclusion
A lot of super-sized drippers can suffer from a lack of flavour due to the large inner chamber washing out the flavour, not so with the Tauren Vortex 30 as that inner airflow chamber actually reduces the inner build deck down to something that you’d find many 25mm drippers which maintains the flavour, the top down airflow system means it isn’t prone to leaking with overzealous dripping either. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the Tauren Vortex 30 so Thunderhead Creations have done an excellent job here.
Many thanks to Thunderhead Creations for sending the Tauren Vortex 30 RDA out for review.

- Good flavour from the condensed inner chamber
- Easy to build
- Good sized drip wells
- Included drip tip is too short

Antony Lord
Reviewer at POTVI was a twenty a day smoker for 25 years and like most smokers I was always going to quit "next week". Having hit my mid forties and having the usual smokers cough and difficulty with anything more than moderate exercise it was obviously time to give up the cancer sticks. I bought my first e-cigarette in 2013 when they were expensive, difficult to find and quite frankly... crap. I used it for about a week then went back to the roll ups, mark up another failed quit attempt. The fact that I had just changed jobs and was under quite a lot of stress probably didn't help. Move on to 2016 and whilst I was browsing eBay I noticed that one of the suggested items that would occasionally pop up was for a cheap e-cigarette. It looked similar to the one I'd bought 3 years earlier but it was only £5 (about 8 times cheaper than before) so I decided to give it another go on a whim. Once the kit arrived I managed to gradually replace the cigarettes with my new kit over a two month period and got into watching YouTube reviews for newer kit. My cheap and cheerful kit was replaced by a more upmarket affair, and being a noob I made a mistake once it arrived... I put in the supplied direct lung coil, this was of course a complete revelation and I haven't touched a cigarette since. Oh and I no longer spend the first five minutes of every day having a coughing fit either.
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