Phaetus Rapido: What's New?

Phaetus recently announced Rapido hotend and it packs some of the advantages of E3D Revo in a more traditional package. Let’s break down the new features and compare it to other hotends.

Rapido comes with a new cylindrical heating unit that resembles the one in E3D Revo. Up until now, all hotends tend to have a V6 style heater block and a standard 6mm heater cartridge. This new heater should provide more even and quicker heating. Phaetus claims it draws up to 115W and can reach 280C in less than 51 seconds. The thermistor comes integrated and cannot be changed later. Unlike Revo heater, it comes in two variantas: a standard thermistor (good up to 280C) and a PT1000 option (at $10 extra) for high-temperature printing.

Another new feature is changing between high flow and ultra-high flow configurations. Other hotends, like Dragon, need to be purchased in either standard flow or high flow configuration and there’s no easy way to change between the two apart from swapping the whole hotend (technically, you could swap just the heatbreak, but that’s not practical). Rapido UHF includes a plated copper ultra high flow adapter that lets you plug in Volcano nozzles and get a whopping 75mm³/sec flow rate (vs 45mm³/sec with a V6 nozze).

Rapido vs Revo: people will compare the two because both are brand new and highly hyped hotends, but they were designed for different use cases. Rapido is a competitor to Volcano, Magnum+ and other high flow hotends while E3D Revo is tailored for ease of use. People looking for the most uncomplicated maintenance will go for Revo, and those looking for the highest flow rate and advanced nozzles will likely go for Rapido. I will update the post when more information becomes available or I get a chance to test it myself.

Update: Trianglelab released CHC Pro Volcano featuring very similar high performance heater, check out my comparison post here.