Introduction

Over the past year I have looked at several high performance heatsinks from various manufacturers. The mould has stayed the same for nearly all of the coolers; build it tall and put large 120mm fans that push the air to the top or rear of the case and hope a case fan removes the air quickly. This is a very efficient way to cool a processor, but it leaves pockets of air around the motherboard.

The result is that many other board manufacturers needed to make larger heatsinks for their components. One company even went as far as including a fan to cool the VRM chips. These take up more area around the processor and were a direct call to heatsink manufacturers not to neglect the motherboard components, otherwise the motherboards heatsinks were going to start invading the CPU coolers territory.

Thermaltake has responded to the complaints of the motherboard manufacturers in a big way; they've brought the Orb design back into the big leagues. This time it's as a twin fan that will not only cool your processor, but your memory, back side of your graphics card and motherboard as well.

The new Thermaltake DuOrb is closely related to the VGA cooler that goes by the same name which we looked at in our mega 9-Way VGA Round-Up a while back. The CPU variant will look very good in a system that uses both coolers; something that Thermaltake must have considered when building the DuOrb coolers.

Let's dive in and see if the DuOrb is just another pretty face that doesn't meet the hype, or if Thermaltake has given enthusiasts a product they can really use.