SUMMARY: Thermaltake has been long been making the Orb style coolers, but they have yet to produce one that works well...until now. Check out some cold hard numbers as Mike Wright puts the newest Orb cooler through its paces.
Testing for this sink followed my normal guidelines so that I can have results that are fairly compared to other heatsinks without bias. Ambient temperature during testing was 21-22C, voltage was set to 1.80 volts and the test system consisted of:
Temperatures were taken at stock speed, again at 1100MHz, and a final time at 1333MHz. This will give us an idea as to the effectiveness of the sink during both normal, moderate and aggressive clock speeds. The 1333MHz speed testing is a new one that I have incorporated, but with the 1GHz processors and above going to much higher levels, it seemed necessary to see what coolers would be effective when these processors are pushed to these higher limits.
Testing itself included measuring the temperature at idle, after a Quake III Deathmatch battle, and again after a continuous looping of MadOnion’s 3dMark2001 Demo. These are the same testing criteria that I have been using in the past, so am maintaining some consistency for the sake of comparison.
OK… Let’s see if the newest Orb can handle the pressure…
- 1000MHz (57.4 Watts)
So far the Dragon Orb is falling into the tail end of the copper units. But even so, the temperatures that we’re seeing here are very acceptable. So now that we see that the new Orb can handle the standard speeds, let’s bump up the juice a little and see how it can handle a small overclock…
- 1100MHz (62.2 Watts)
Its beginning to look like that copper slug is paying off now. The temperatures this round have been very close to the monster cooler, the Gladiator. Granted, this is a pretty mild overclock, but it’s still showing that the Dragon Orb is capable of handling some stress.
So let’s go ahead and boost this thing to 1333 and see how it hangs with the big boys…
1333MHz (73.6 Watts)
With the exception of being about a half degree off in the idle temperature category, this Orb did very well. I always try to maintain temperatures under the 45C mark, and this cooler managed to do that with no trouble at all. It looks like the folks at Thermaltake created themselves a winner with the Dragon Orb 3.
