Volcano 9 Problem

[vk2amv]

I recieved my new volcano 9 CPU cooler a few days ago. When I recieved it I noticed deep rings from the outside to the inside that look like machining/manufacturing marks. At the time I was worried because I had read many reviews about this and they all said that it was supposed to be smooth without any imperfections. I decided to try it anyway. Now I am using at the moment a 1.4gig T-Bird. I have used Arctic Silver 3 for both heatsinks I used. Before this HSF I had a cheapy globalwin aluminium HSF. Just a real cheap and nasty one only rated to 1.3gighz to make it harder for it. Now at an ambient temp of around 27-28 degrees C the globalwin kept the CPU at around 51 degrees C under 100% load with divx 502 encoding. Now with the volcano 9 it is only able to keep the CPU at 54 degrees C under the exact same conditions with the volcano fan going at 4800rev and above the rated speed up to a max of 5661rev. Now I want suggestions on what I should do. I have sent an email to thermaltake but no response as of yet. I mainly want to know if this is a warranty matter to be returned to where I bought it or if I should just smooth off the copper insert myself with fine sandpaper.
Thanks for any suggestions.
AREA_51

 

[HammerBot]

How deep are these rings? I would expect it to be so smooth that you cant feel any edges. Large rings or uneveness will deffinitely degrade performance. I will not recommend you try even the rings with sandpaper, since this will probably cause the surface to be hollow.

 

[vk2amv]

Goto here http://overclockersclub.com/thermaltakevolcano9review.shtml and you will see a picture of the bottem of the heatsink half way down the page so you can see what I am talking about. Now the rings are not massively deep. They are only on the copper insert. The aluminium is smooth. They are deep enough that if I run the pad my finger across the surface of the copper insert I can feel the groves in it. Not real noticable with the pad of my finger but I can feel them. They are really noticable if I run my fingernail along the surface though. And if needed I do know the proper way to sand this smooth. You tape really really fine sand paper to a piece of glass facing up (duh) and just sit the HSF on it and move the HSF on the sand paper around to smooth it off. (You can do the same with CPU`s with heat spreaders to smooth them off.) I just wanted to try the warranty route first before I void it.
Thanks
AREA_51

 

[HammerBot]

I really dont think they look so deep that they will cause a problem with the proper thermal grease. However, if you really want to try and reduce them the proposed method seems a good way to go about it.

 

[vk2amv]

Well that is not the auctual heatsink I am talking about in that picture. You are right that the grooves on the one pictures is not too bad. I just used that one as a reference so you could see exactly what/where I am talking about. Mine is worse than that. And it is causing performance problems. I reset it with arctic silver again last night and it made no difference to it. Ahh well I will sand this thing off. That should help.
Thanks for the help and advise.
AREA_51