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home >  reviews > casing & cooling > thermaltake blue orb
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Thermaltake Blue Orb
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| Author: TweakTown Staff |
SUMMARY: Thermaltake Blue Orb |
| Editor: Cameron Wilmot |
| Category: Casing & Cooling |
| Published: 11th July 2001 |
| Manufacturer: Thermaltake |
| Our Rating: 8.0 out of 10 |
  
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Introduction
Thermaltake made it’s claim to fame when they released a high performance cooler called the Golden Orb, a new cooler for slot and socket coolers which performed quite well compared to Global Win and Alpha. Not to long ago, we here at TweakTown got a email from Kenny at Thermaltake asking would we like to test their latest Orb cooler and we replied saying we would be more than happy to. I was quite surprised when I got it, it was blue, small and sexy, Thermaltake have popped out a baby orb for chipsets!
The blue orb is a chipset sized cooler, from the pictures we can see its almost identical to the CPU orbs made by Thermaltake only smaller. The blue orb is almost 1cm bigger in diameter than the traditional chipset coolers. The Blue orb connects using pushdown pins that align with the old pin holes that are on most motherboards that hold down the traditional green heatsink or the holes on most video cards like Geforce, TNT2U and many other heatsinks. The orb gets its power from a standard 3 pin fan header, unfortunately this cooler only has a very short cable and unless you have a fan header real close to the AGP slot if you want to use it for AGP cards you will be out of luck and will have to buy and extension cable. The fan itself is a high performance ball bearing fan maxing out at around 4500RPM its pretty quiet compared to other chipset coolers. As we can see from the pictures we can see just how big this chipset cooler is. Due to its size if you use it on your video card you will loose the use of the PCI slot under the AGP card, this is not normally a problem to most people as PCI 1 shares the same IRQ as the AGP slot and not many people want devices sharing the same IRQ as their video cards.
Specifications
P/N: TGF020
Application Chipset cooler
Dimensions: 55dia X 20mm tall
Clip Type Push Pin clip included for easy installation
Fan Size: 43dia x 15 mm 3-wire fan with tachometer
Rated Voltage (V): 12 volt
Noise Level(dBA): 26 db
Rated Speed(RPM): 4600 RPM
Heat Sink Material: Aluminum 6030
Thermal Resistance: Theta ca=0.47degC/w
Special Feature Radial Fin design to increase heat dissipation
Highest performance for a active heat sink
Testing
For the tests we used a Nvidia Geforce2 MX (MSI Starforce 816), Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra (ASUS V3800) and the MSI K7T Pro motherboard’s KT133 Chipset for comparisons. We used a digital thermal probe to record the temperatures...
- Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra
Stock Heatsink Idle: 27
Stock Heatsink Stressed: 35
Blue Orb Idle: 22
Blue Orb Stressed: 30.5
We can see that the blue orb does make quite a difference on the TNT2 Ultra, most TNT2 Ultra’s heatsink are a bit too small.
- Nvidia Geforce2 MX
Stock Heatsink Idle: 25
Stock Heatsink Stressed: 37
Blue Orb Idle: 20
Blue Orb Stressed: 28.9
We can see again the Blue Orb performing better than the heatsink on the MSI Starforce 816 video card; this is to be expected, as the stock heatsink is a passive cooler and not active cooling.
- MSI K7T Pro KT133 Chipset
Stock Heatsink Idle: 24
Stock Heatsink Stressed: 29
Blue Orb Idle: 22
Blue Orb Stressed: 27
Again the Blue Orb outperforms the green heatsink on the MSI K7T Pro but not by much, this is due to the KT133 chipset producing a lot less heat than most chipsets.
Conclusion
Thermaltake have once again made another winner, design is good, size is just about right and performance is above average, with only a few niggles which can be sorted out in later revisions this cooler get a 8 out of 10.
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