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Battle Of The Orbs!


Date
: 12/11/00 – 11:18:36 PM

Author
:

Category
: Cooling

Manufactor: Thermaltake

Price Super Orb: $24

Price Chrome Orb: $15

Thanks to MPL for supplying us with the Super Orb & the Chrome Orb!

Introduction

Let’s write our introduction with a little Thermaltake & Orb history, shall we? During the course of this year, Thermaltake has made itself very popular as a provider of really nice value market heatsinks. For budget minded socket370 motherboard owners, Thermaltake’s Golden Orb has become one of the most, if not THE most popular cooling solution for that platform. The Golden Orb was (is) popular mainly because of its price, certainly compared to what people were charging for Alphas and similar coolers. The Golden Orb cooled well enough for Pentium 3 CPU’s; they didn’t get very hot in the first place. Even I’m using a the Golden Orb(Gorb) to cool down my P3-700 which runs at a blazing 1008Mhz. Alright Steven, shut up about the Golden Orb because this just isn’t a Golden Orb review!

Now, let’s talk about the new Orbs from Thermaltake. Because of the Golden Orb’s huge success, Thermaltake realised they had to make some Gorb redesigns intended for AMD Duron/Athlon systems. After a few adjustments to the Gorb, the Chrome Orb came into play for Socket A CPU’s. A short time after the Chrome Orb, the Super Orb was born. The Super Orb is one hell of a big ass cooler which has been especially designed for AMD Athlon ‘Thunderbird’ processors up to 1.5GHz. At first sight, you’ll see the Super Orb is basically an updated and enlarged Chrome Orb.

Let’s check out some differences between these Chrome & Super Orbs…

Specifications

	CHROME ORB	SUPER ORB
Application	AMD socket 462/A	AMD socket 462/A
Dimensions	69mm diameter x 45mm high	69mm diameter x 74mm high
Clip Type	TCS09 Clip on Clip	TCS09 Clip on Clip
Fan Size	43x25mm 3-wire with RPM Sensor	43x25mm 3-wire with RPM Sensor
Fan specs	12 Volt 29 dBA 25 CFM 5500 RPM	Top Fan 12 Volt 30 dBA 23.1 CFM 5000 RPM Bottom Fan 12 Volt 28 dBA 21 CFM 5500 RPM
Bearing System	Ball Bearing	Ball Bearing
Interface Material	Aluminium 6030	Aluminium 6030
Fan safety	UL/CE/CSA	UL/CE/CSA
Thermal Resistance	Theta JA=0.81c/w	Theta JA=0.66c/w
Special Feature	Square base plate (Fully covers all 4 CPU rubber feet)	Square base plate (Fully covers all 4 CPU rubber feet)

My First Impressions

Chrome Orb

As you can see from these pictures, the Chrome Orb is indeed chrome! Thermaltake probably made this socket A Orb in a chrome color instead of a copper one to allow the Chrome Orb & the Golden Orb to be differentiated from one another on sight. The base of the Chrome Orb, the square plate, has been seriously expanded to allow it to sit on the plastic stabilizing feet of the Duron/Tbird CPUs, thereby reducing the risk of cracking or breaking a corner of the CPU’s core while mounting the cooler. By the way, did you know there are 2 versions of the Chrome Orb for sale? A ‘normal’ version which has a diameter of 69mm and a ‘smaller’ version with a diameter of 64mm especially designed to fit space-limited mainboards like a KT7-RAID. Of course, this smaller version has a little less cooling power because of it’s lesser surface area.

Super Orb

Basically, there aren’t too many differences between the Chrome Orb and the Super Orb. One difference is that the height of this cooler towers over the Chrome Orb by a good 29mm, totaling a monstrous 74mm. Compared to the Chrome Orb, this extra surface area theoretically makes cooling a lot better. The height of the cooler may be an issue in some cases which have the power supply over the CPU socket (like some of the cheaper Enlight cases). The only solution here is to get yourself & your components a better housing environment.

The height of the heatsink is only one of the differences between a Chrome Orb & a Super Orb. The main highlight of the Super Orb would have to be the dual fans. The bottom fan is nearly the same as the one used on the Chrome Orb, which spins at 5500 RPM. The fan does 21cfm which is 1cfm slower than the his older brother, but still 1cfm faster than the Golden Orb fan. The top fan is pushing the air at 23cfm, spinning at 5000 RPM and a rather noisy 30dBa. What’s also interesting to know, is that all these fans are made by Thermaltake, as you can tell by the Tt logos on top of all fans. Just one more remark about the fans; while the specs are telling us the bottom fan should spin at 5500 RPM and the top fan at 5000 RPM, these fans are actually spinning at 6400 RPM and 4600 RPM, respectively. Check out the picture below if you don’t believe me..

The TIM

The TIM, or
T
hermal
I
nterface
M
aterial, is the little piece of ‘bubblegum’ that helps reduce thermal interface resistance between the heatsink and CPU core. It is a standard on most heatsinks and it functions as a substitute for thermal grease. TIMs are usually not the most effective means of conducting heat, however, so whatever comes with the heatsink is usually scraped off, to be replaced by the thermal grease of your choice. Most people find that applying thermal grease(depends what kind) lessens the temperature by a couple or more degrees, compared to thermal pads.

Take a look at the TIM of the Chrome Orb..

Installation

Because the installation procedure of these 2 Orb’s is identical, I’ll have to explain it only once. Note that the whole installation part isn’t as easy as it might seem! Here we go: First of all you need to remove the TIM & put some thermal grease onto the square base plate. Then put the heatsink onto the CPU and close the clip. That’s all.

When installing the sink, I strongly advise everyone to be extremely careful on how much pressure you put on the CPU when trying to get the clip down. Try pushing a little on the middle of the cooler with one hand, while pushing the clip down with the other hand. That’s the way I did it & my Duron is still alive :) Furthermore, I can tell you these 2 Orb’s aren’t designed to be removed and replaced on a daily base. From my own experience I can tell it’s quite easy to put on the clip but is very difficult to remove it again. In fact, the clip is just a real pain in the ass!

Here are some pics to show you how your system should look after you installed these coolers correctly..

– UPDATE 12/19/00 –

Some readers have asked us if the SuperOrb from Thermaltake will fit the P3 and the Celeron cpu’s. So Tim tested this with a Celeron 733 and the Abit SE6 and we can confirm that the SuperOrb sits perfectly flat on the cpu and cools it down very well.

Here are some pics to prove he’s right :

– END OF THE UPDATE –

Testing

System setup

- Asus A7V motherboard

- AMD Duron 800 @ 1.05Ghz (10x105MHz)

- 128MB pc133 RAM (cas 2-3-3)

- IBM UDMA/100 7200rpm 30GB

- Creative Geforce DDR

- Win2k (SP1)

- Directx 8 final + Detonator 7.17 + VIA 4.25a

The Results

Before I go any further, I need to tell you what I mean by ‘full load’. In our test setup, full load means 2 hours of Prime95 together with RC5.

As you can see on the picture, the Super Orb is the absolute winner here. However, I was pretty amazed to see a Chrome Orb coming really close to the Super Orb’s cooling performance. With both Orbs, my Duron 800 setup ran just fine at a rockstable 1.05Ghz (1.85v). This wasn’t the case when I used the standard AMD heatsink. After about 1 hour of full load and a temperature of 55C, the system suddenly rebooted and proved me it wasn’t perfectly stable. I also played Quake 3 for about an hour with each of the Orbs with no crashes or errors at all. Although I was already sure both of the Orbs could handle the job, I decided to end my testing by doing some flawless 3DMark2k demo loops.

Chrome Orb

Good

- Great performance in its class

- Cheap

- The same old, but very nice ‘Orb’ design

Bad

- Dangerous mounting clip. Beware!

Super Orb

Good

- Great performance in general

- Cheap compared to other equaly performing coolers

- Dual fan

- The same old, but very nice ‘Orb’ design

Bad

- Dangerous mounting clip. Beware!

- Rather noisy with the 2 fans

- Height can be an issue

- Doesn’t fit on all mobos

Conclusion

Well, I believe the results speak for themselves. At full load at 1050mhz the Chrome orb dropped the CPU temperature by 4C compared to the standard heatsink & fan. The Orbs’s fans are in fact much quieter than those heatsink combos that use 70mm high output fans but still manages to keep the CPU cool.

The Super Orb is one of the first socket A coolers to use a dual fan set up, and does a slightly better job than the Chrome Orb by dropping the temperature by 7C instead of 4C. Sadly enough, the shape of the Super Orb may be it’s undoing on some of the motherboards out there. For example, the Abit KT7 definitely requires the Super Orb to be modified before it will fit.

Some last words.. Thermaltake supplies us with the best looking high-end coolers in the world at budget prices. Way to go guys..