Vandy Vape Requiem RTA Review by Owen

Introduction

The Requiem RTA is a very clever design, I’m not going to say innovative because I have no idea if it’s the first RTA with these features, but there are certainly a lot of clever things going on.

Product overview

The Requiem RTA is a 24mm, single-coil RTA with side-airflow, 4.5ml juice capacity, three tanks that offer different airflow and chimney size for MTL, restricted DL and DL and two top-caps, one for 810 and the other for 510 drip-tips.

First impressions

I couldn’t wait to get the box open and see exactly what was going on with the tanks, I was a little worried about the amount of plastic inside.

Regarding the plastic (or PSU), I was 50% satisfied and still 50% concerned; the chimney is metal and the metal top-section screws into the metal, the bottom of the tank fits into the base with a bayonet fitting—so there are no issues with screwing anything into metal. However, the airflow slots are PSU and despite claims of PSU being highly heat resistant, I don’t like hot coils near plastic. Either way, this isn’t the first time I’ve had plastic inside an atomizer, and I haven’t melted anything yet.

The styling of the Requiem is quite attractive, it doesn’t have an overly fussy design and pairs well with a lot of mods.

Build

For a 24mm single-coil RTA, the deck is a little smaller than expected. Securing the coil onto the deck looks simple, but there are two things to be aware of; firstly there is a plastic ring that you put on the deck as a coil height guide (you don’t need to, but it’s very easy to use) and there are small ridges next to the deck screws—these screws help keep the coil aligned (maybe to keep them away from the plastic airflow slots?), but also make coiling a little harder. Overall, it’s still an easy deck to work on, and doesn’t require any pre-cutting of coil leads.

Wicking is simple, I cut my cotton about level with the outside of the RTA base, thinned, fluffed and tucked it and was good to go. I was careful not to over-stuff the cotton, but that goes for every RTA.

How does it perform?

All of my builds were with 2.5mm coils, I’m sure I could have squeezed 3.0mm in there, but it came with 2.5mm and I consider that to be a pretty strong recommendation regarding coil size.

I used the supplied fused clapton that came to 0.28ohm with the DL and restricted DL tanks and was very pleased with the results, the Requiem seems to prioritize flavor over cloud production and I never felt the need to push it further than 40w to get excellent flavor.

For the MTL tank, I used a 2.5mm superfine MTL fused clapton and a round wire build. The round wire build was merely okay, but the fused clapton worked well for this tank and its airflow.

However, I’m going to get opinionated about using this RTA for MTL. As far as I’m concerned tight MTL is all about throat-hit and for the perfect throat hit you need air hitting the underside of the coil. Loose MTL is about flavor and hitting the side of the coil works well. This is the sort of MTL does well with fruit flavors, open airflow and claptons, not so good with tobacco juices, supertight airflow and round wire.

Airflow

For a lot of people, the choice of tanks in the Requiem is clever, and I’ll agree. However, the airflow impressed me even more. Due to the design of the tank and juice flow, you also get full RDA-style side airflow, with the airflow just slamming into the side of the coil. This is very desirable when it comes to flavor.

The airflow is adjustable, but does not have a stopper. Initially, it was really hard for me to align the airflow correctly, but then I noticed three horizontal bars on the base of the RTA, align the airflow with these bars and it’s perfectly aligned.

However, this RTA claims to offer MTL, restricted DL and DL. I will disagree with those claims, the two larger tanks give restricted DL and more restricted DL, this is not fully open and airy DL than you’re going to be hitting at 60W and above.

Tanks

All three tanks have the same 4.5ml capacity, what’s important about them is that they also have the airflow and different chimney diameters:

• DL tank (kinda restricted DL though) 5mm chimney and a large single airflow slot on each side.
• Restricted DL tank 4mm chimney and dual airflow holes on each side.
• MTL tank 3mm chimney and single airflow holes on each side.

Different airflow configurations are nothing special, this can be achieved in many ways, however having different size chimneys is a really good feature. So many RTAs claiming to be ‘from DL to MTL’ fail because you can’t get a decent MTL with a DL width chimney and vice versa.

Conclusion

So many RTAs claim to be versatile, and usually they are either mediocre at everything or do one thing very well at the expense of everything else.

This isn’t the case with the Requiem RTA, it does everything very well.

If I was looking for a purely MTL RTA, I’d look elsewhere and get a dedicated MTL RTA, likewise if I wanted a very airy and open DL RTA, this wouldn’t be my choice.

However, within the realm of loose MTL to restricted DL, this covers everything very well.

Disclaimer

The Requiem RTA was provided for the purposes of this review by Healthcabin.

This review was written by Owen from Vaping Underground, click to view original review there with more details.