With a Velocity-style two-post build deck, under-coil airflow, a conical Delrin drip tip and a substantial e-juice well, the Tsunami RDA looks like a great deal at $29.99, but does the reality live up to the hype? Our GeekVape Tsunami review finds out.
Is it worth buying?
The GeekVape Tsunami RDA is an excellent dripping atomizer. The Velocity-style deck makes rebuilding a painless process and the under-coil airflow means you get exceptional vapor production and flavor from every puff.
Combine this with the still-deep e-juice well (even though the deck-space it covers is limited by the airflow tubes), the smooth and pleasantly airy draw and the unassumingly cool appearance and you have an RDA that’s pretty hard to beat. For just under $30, if you’re in the market for a dripper, it’s well worth picking up, whether you’re a seasoned rebuilder or brand new to the hobby.
Full review
In some ways, rebuildable atomizers are the simplest vaping atomizers on the market. All you need is two or three posts, a chamber to hide them under and a top cap and you’re good to go. But we all know there’s a lot more to RDAs than that. From a multitude of airflow arrangements to different deck layouts and plenty of details to consider like the size of the juice well and the susceptibility to leaking, picking your RDA isn’t as easy as you might think. And there’s so much competition in the field it’s hard to even know where to start.
GeekVape is a pretty new manufacturer, having just been established in 2015. They already have an impressive range of atomizers and are making waves in the industry after only a short time in business. The Tsunami RDA is one of the newest additions to their line-up. It offers a Velocity-style two-post build deck, sizable post holes, under-coil, Kennedy-style airflow and a minimalist, no-nonsense appearance. But does the RDA do enough to justify the $30 price tag? Can it stand out from the competition? Our GeekVape Tsunami RDA review puts the dripping atomizer through it’s paces to find out.
Note: the Tsunami was received as part of Vapebox’s subscription service. You can read more about Vapebox in the dedicated review here.
What You Get
The Tsunami RDA comes in a small cardboard box with an image of the RDA on the front and some key facts about the atomizer on the back. Inside, your rebuildable dripping atomizer sits in a foam insert, with two spare drip tips (one standard 510 option and one straight-sided and threaded to fit the RDA) to the right of it, an Allen key and a bag of spare parts underneath, including a 510 adapter for the drip tip, spare screws for the posts and a selection of spare O-rings. This is more than enough to accompany the device, so it’s a solid offering here from GeekVape.
Tsunami RDA Design
The Tsunami RDA has a very bare-bones appearance from the outside. The straight-sided top cap completely covers the deck. It has no branding or other marks on the outside: all you can see is the stainless steel exterior, the inward-sloping drip tip and the two airflow slots towards the bottom of the RDA. The RDA has a 22 mm diameter, so it fits flush to most mods. The no-nonsense appearance means it looks excellent on everything from box mods to mechs.
Under the top cap, things really start to get interesting. The two-post, Velocity-style deck is the first thing you notice, with the rectangular posts sticking up proudly from the deck with the sizeable rectangular post-holes (measuring 2.1 by 3 mm) occupied by grub-screws. The positive post has a PEEK insulator just visible at the base. This provides excellent heat-resistance for higher-wattage vaping.
On either side of the posts are matching sets of 4 mm diameter airflow tubes, which rise up to the level of the deck and open up to give a direct, under-coil airflow. The two oval-shaped airflow slots in the bottom match up to two on the top cap, and there’s also a single hole in the top-cap so you can set up the RDA to suit single-coil builds. The Tsunami atomizer also has a 5 mm e-juice well, which is great even though much of the deck space is occupied by the airflow tubes.
The only branding on the device is on the front of the deck, where the word “Tsunami” is printed in bold, proud letters between the bands of two O-rings. This actually looks pretty cool, although you’ll only ever see it when you’re removing the top cap to drip or rebuild your coils. “Designed and manufactured by GeekVape” is also written around the bottom of the RDA, surrounding the gold-plated contact pin.
Finally, the drip tip section of the device is threaded. This means that the slightly conical, wide-bore Delrin tip screws into place firmly and won’t come off unless you intend to remove it. There is a straight-sided Delrin drip tip in the box too, and a stainless steel 510 option (with a threaded adapter so it fits in the wide opening of the top cap) if you prefer.
Overall, the Geek Vape Tsunami RDA does an excellent job in terms of design. It looks great from an aesthetic perspective and offers everything you need to have a smooth building experience and get outstanding performance.
Ease of Rebuilding
The Velocity-style deck on the Tsunami atomizer pretty much guarantees as a pleasant building experience. The post-holes are huge, so you can get the legs of your coils in the spaces even with thicker Clapton wires or anything similarly large. Once you’ve wrapped your coils, you simply unscrew the grub screws with the included hex key, insert the ends through two opposite holes and screw it down. There are two post-holes in each post, so setting up dual coils is absolutely painless.
There’s plenty of deck-space, so you don’t feel cramped when you’re building. It’s also easy to get your coils nicely positioned over the airflow slots. The only thing you’ve got to be a bit careful with is positioning the wicks so they don’t guide your juice down through the airflow tubes and cause leaking, but this is easy to do and doesn’t often cause an issue.
Overall, the Tsunami RDA is an absolute pleasure to build on. If you have any experience with rebuilding, you won’t run into any issues at all. Even if you’re brand new to it, the Tsunami atomizer is a pretty good device to start with.
Tsunami RDA In Use
This is the most important part of this Tsunami RDA review. The device could have excellent design and be a pleasure to build on, but still fall down completely flat when it comes to day-to-day use.
Thankfully, that isn’t the case here. Once you’ve got your coils built and dripped your juice, the performance is exceptional. The under-coil airflow is the biggest factor in making the Tsunami an excellent RDA, providing a direct path from your coils up to the drip tip. The result is an rebuildable dripping atomizer that offers tons of flavor – making every single flavor note of your e-liquid pop out at you – and provides fantastic vapor production. The performance is great regardless of the drip tip you use, but I find the conical one that comes installed offers the best flavor.
The draw on the Tsunami RDA is nice and smooth, and even the most open airflow setting doesn’t feel hugely loose and airy. For lovers of really open airflow this may not be ideal, but with vapor production so exceptional it’s hard to see how it would cause an issue. The draw is still pleasantly airy, but it’s got enough resistance to it to keep vapers like me (who aren’t big on whooshing, massive airflow) happy.
As you close off the airflow slots, the device still produces more than enough vapor, but at the minimum it does tighten up the draw quite a bit, as well as improving the flavor even further. It isn’t a device for those who prefer a mouth to lung draw (due to the positioning of the airflow tubes more than anything), but there is quite a lot of potential for adjusting it to suit your preferences. Usually I partially close off my airflow, but with the Tsunami I’m more than happy with it all the way open.
Leaking is a pretty persistent problem with most rebuildable dripping atomizers. Thankfully, despite the openings under the coil for the airflow, the Tsunami RDA manages to keep leaking to an absolute minimum. As mentioned earlier, you have to take care over the positioning of your wicks to ensure you don’t get any down there, but even if you do, the bottom airflow holes go horizontally into the body of the device before rising up through the tubes, so it doesn’t leak much at all. In fact, aside from one or two drops falling directly down into the holes, I only had issues leaking when juice accumulated on the edges of the vape juice well and got pushed down with the top cap.
Although this is a necessary evil as a result of the sizeable under-coil airflow tubes, the only real downside to the GeekVape Tsunami RDA in use is the limited amount of space in the e-juice well. Although it’s deep, you’re only left with a C-shaped section on either side of the deck. If you were looking at the volume of the well rather than its depth (which is really the important thing) it would sound a lot less impressive.
However, minor issues like this are completely dwarfed by the exceptional performance and the ease of use of the RDA. On the whole, it’s an absolute pleasure to vape with.
Tsunami RDA Build Quality
The GeekVape Tsunami dripping atomizer may be a Chinese-made RDA, but the build quality seems solid. With high-quality materials used throughout – including PEEK insulators and hardened set screws – and snug fits on both the top cap and the threading for the 510 connection and drip tip, there’s nothing to complain about here.