Introduction

Thermaltake is back with one of our favorite CPU cooling designs, the Orb. The latest offering is a revamp of the MaxOrb we tested back in December, but with a twist of copper added in for good measure. The original MaxOrb fared well in our performance tests and I found the mounting mechanism for Intel motherboards innovative. To this day, I use the MaxOrb on one of my open-air test rigs and have yet to uncover any issues with the design.

Copper is better at pulling heat away from an object, but it takes longer to pull the heat away from copper when it is used as a fin. This said, I am not too sure why Thermaltake chose to make the fins on the new MaxOrb copper, since in theory it would take longer to dispel the heat from them in relation to aluminum. The inner loop of fins is still made of aluminum as you will see in the images, so maybe the change is purely cosmetic.

Let's dive in and take a look at the new Thermaltake MaxOrb EX; we'll then test it the same way we did the MaxOrb and all of our other CPU coolers to see if Thermaltake were able to get even more performance out of the Orb design.