Dovpo x TVC Topside Dual Squonk Mod: Test Results Are In

Product intro and specs

The Topside Dual is the latest mod from Dovpo, and their second dual-battery squonk mod after the Basium. They’ve been around for a few years, but I personally haven’t reviewed many of their products — although I did review their single battery Topside not long ago, and I found it to be a good performer. Once again, this mod is designed by Brian from The Vapor Chronicles, aka TVC, who has designed the Drop series of atomizers.

The Dovpo Topside Dual is a rare dual-18650 squonk mod, rated at 200 watts with a nice size black and white screen on front and, as was the case with the single-battery Topside, it is designed to be filled via the top without removing the bottle. It’s available in 8 colors, all of which are black on the top and bottom.

This mod was sent to me free of charge by MyVpro, where it’s currently available at a discounted price.

Price: $89.99 (at MyVPro)

Colors: Black, silver, gunmetal, red, blue, purple, gold, green

First impressions

When I first got this mod, it was pretty much what I was expecting. Having already reviewed the original Topside, this is simply just a dual-battery version of the original, which also means a little bigger. It’s quite a bit thicker due to the extra battery compartment, but outside of that they look pretty similar. This one comes with the updated firmware already installed to have all the modes on, and does not require an update to unlock the temp control and other modes, as was the case with the original Topside.

Overall, I liked the design from the start since there aren’t many affordable dual-18650 squonk mods on the market. The only other recent ones I can think of are the Smoant Battlestar Squonk, the Pulse Dual, the Dovpo Basium, and of course the much more expensive Drone 250C.

Build quality and design

The Dovpo Topside is a very nicely built and well-designed mod that is quite comfortable to hold in the hand. It is big and heavy though, larger than most of the dual battery squonk mods I’ve used. I don’t mind the size and weight at all personally, but it’s worth noting for those who prefer smaller and lighter devices. In fact, any dual-battery squonk mod is going to be a bit bulky just to be able to fit the two batteries and the squonk bottle in it. The shape is very ergonomic and it’s also easy to squonk with your middle and ring fingers. It can even be squonked while vaping on it, so great design there. I got the Silver one and the coloring is nice. It’s not shiny but it’s not matte either. It’s somewhere between those and has shown no signs of wearing or chipping. The fill cap for the squonk has a nice knurling texture to it to make it easy to unscrew and screw back on.

There is no button rattle at all on this mod. The 510 pin is great and gave me no issues with any atomizers. The 510 platform itself can fit a 25 mm atomizer with no overhang quite easily, with a bit of room to spare. That will cover most atomizers on the market and there shouldn’t be any issue unless you want to use a 30 mm RDA — which is rare for people to use and hardly made these days. The screen is a nice and bright 0.96-inch black and white screen that is easy to read. The USB port is on the side of the mod and the fire button is large and clicky. The battery tray is a pretty standard bottom-latch system. While I had no issues getting batteries in and out and it doesn't damage wraps, it is very hard to open and shut due to the bottle system getting in the way. It should be easier to open and close, in my opinion.

Features and functions

In the menu system you have the following modes: Power (no pre-heat options), Voltage Mode, TC for Ni200, Ti, and SS and TCR mode. It has all the basic modes but nothing extra like a watt curve mode which would have been nice, but not a huge deal. There is also a “Stats” option in the menu which shows your puff count and puff timer.

What sets apart the Topside mods from competition is the top-fill mechanism, which is very convenient and is just like filling up a tank. Same as with the original, there is a knurled and grippy cap on the mod which you have to unscrew. After you unscrew it, you pull it out and you have two nice sized fill holes to fill up the bottle. After filling, you just push the cap back into place and keep pushing down while screwing it on. Very practical and much less messy than removing the bottle to fill.

The squonk bottle is larger than most at 10 mL, but I had some minor issues when using it which I am going to discuss in the following section.

Using the Dovpo Topside Dual

The Dovpo Topside Dual (unlike the original) comes out of the box with all the features and modes. The menu system is also very easy to use as well.

When in the menu, you just use up and down to scroll and fire to accept. Really nicely done menu system. When in power mode it scrolls by a full watt at 100+ and by 0.5 watts under 100 watts, so well done there as well. Holding the up or down button quickly adjusts by full watts and it also round-robbins.

Using the mod to squonk I found that I have one minor complaint, as it’s hard to see if the bottle full. You can see the bottom 75% of the bottle through the cutout but not the top so it’s hard to fill all the way up unless you want to risk overfilling it. Removing the bottle is easy enough but you first need to open the battery latch, which as I said earlier is not that easy to do. Outside of that, the bottle is housed in a bracket, so you pull the whole bracket out and then remove the bottle to clean it. We’ve seen similar bracketed bottles in mods like the Aspire Feedlink and it works well.

The squonking itself gave me more issues than the original though. The bottle squonks just fine when full but once you get about halfway down it doesn't feed e-liquid at the same rate. I had to squeeze it all the way and hold it to make it squonk, and it did it quite slowly. It is a little bit inconvenient, but with the bottle having a capacity of 10 mL you have around 5 mL of proper squonking until it starts becoming bothersome.

Power mode performance

Testing on this mod was done with Sony VTC5A batteries. They list the specs at 200 watts and 12 volts, but no amp limit listed. I wish they listed all three as I feel every manufacturer should do that. During my testing, the max achieved wattage was 232, so it is accurately rated and capable of doing a bit more than the 200 listed. The amp limit I got was 40 amps, which is at the high side of most dual battery mods these days — most are around 37-40. That was with a 0.12-ohm build at 195 watts, so thanks to the high amp limit, you can almost access the full 200 watts even with such a low resistance build.

The volt limit I got with a 0.61-ohm coil was 11.887, which shows there is a boost circuit like there should be based on their specs. I see that as a bonus with a dual battery mod as many of them don’t have boost circuits; they aren’t as important as they are for single cell mods. I was actually limited by the watts (hit 232 at that resistance), so the max voltage could potentially reach the full 12 volts. Very nice performance there.

Temperature control mode performance

As I mentioned earlier, the Dual comes with the updated firmware which means that TC mode is enabled out of the box as it should be. I do all my testing with SS316 wire. For this mod I tested 6 different builds:

You get the full wattage to adjust ramp up as well and can change wattage by using the up and fire button. In SS mode, it was very weak and anemic, so it's not accurate enough to be usable. So I went into TCR mode and dialed in the TCR to 130 to get it to be accurate enough where you get a warm vape at around 450 F. However, it doesn't mean it was good. It still throttles back way too hard to give a good vape and is a bit inconsistent in its performance; I had to adjust power every couple of puffs to get the same puff I just had. Sadly, as of now I haven’t used a non-DNA dual-battery squonk mod that does good TC, and the Dual does nothing to change that. It’s not worse than the other affordable options, but sadly not a mod I’d recommend for TC usage.

Pros / Cons

Verdict