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Blue Orb Cooler


Date
: 12/30/00 – 09:09:50 PM

Author
:

Category
: Cooling

Manufactor: Thermaltake

Price: $12

Thanks to 2Cooltek for kindly supplying us with the Blue Orb

Introduction

We all like overclocking our prescious hardware in order to get more performance out of it but when we overclock our equipement we are faced with
several problems. The worst nightmare of every overclocker out there is heat! Heat will cause arctifacts when your videocard is overclocked too high, heat will cause your cpu to crash when you’re one minute away from finishing that 200MB download and eventually heat will cause your hardware to fail.

I already had a quick rant about how overclocking causes heat and how that heat causes lockups and arctifacts in your favorite game (for me: Quake3: Arena). My Hercules Geforce GTS, which runs at a default speed of 220MHz core and 365MHz memory, already made it rockstable to 235MHz core speed and 405MHz memory speed. In the mere beginning I was satisfied with this ‘decent’ overclock, but after browsing through all the overclocking forums and reading how high some of you got their GTS, I decided it was time to do something about it.

The core of my Hercules GTS card was really maxed out at 235MHz, because anything faster would actually cause major arctifacts in my favorite game ever (you guessed it) Q3: Arena. Although I knew that the Geforce GTS cards are being bottlenecked by the memory and not by the core speed, I still wanted to reach that magical 250MHz core speed just like the Geforce GTS Ultra.

The heatsink and fan that Guillemot puts on their cards are pretty good, but they aren’t good enough to get the core all the way up to Ultra specs!
After looking for a good video/chipset heatsink, my eyes fell upon the Blue Orb made by the same company that designed the famous Golden Orb and all its younger brothers like the Chrome Orb and the Super Orb (which we reviewed here).

Thermaltake did a damn fine job on designing a cooler that would fit both videocards and chipsets (e.g. to cool a chipset on a motherboard) and today
I am taking a good look at how well the ‘Blorb’ performs and how high I would be able to overclock my Geforce GTS with it.

Specifications

Here is what Thermaltake has to say about the Blue Orb:

Application: Chipset cooler, GeForce 2, 3dfx, …

Dimensions: 55mm diameter X 20mm tall

Clip Type Push Pin clip included for easy installation

Fan Size: 43mm diameter x 15mm 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 heatsink

Thanks to it’s size, the Blue Orb will fit most videocards and all chipsets available. The Blorb is shippedwith both push pins and a piece of frag tape. The pins come in very handy because this way you can install the Blue Orb on the existing holes of the retail cooler. The Hercules GTS card was perfect for this since the holes in the Orb alligned perfectly with the ones on the videocard. In case your videocard has no holes in it, you can also install the cooler with the frag tape. This will make it more difficult to remove the Blorb (why would you want that anyway?). Thermaltake also includes a good amount of thermal paste to put between the Blue Orb and the chipset you will be installing the blue cooler on.

Last but not least, the Blorb comes with a connector that lets you connect the fan to a standard molex powerconnector. Most videocards use a 2-pin
connector to run the retail fans on, but since most aftermarket coolers come with a 3-pin connector, these onboard connectors aren’t any good for us :(.

Installation

Since I could use the push pins to install the orb, installing it was a breeze. If you use the thermal pad it is a bit more tricky to install it properly, but if you do it with care it shouldn’t be a problem.

Here is the my good old GTS card in all its glory …

First I had to remove the retail cooler from the Guillemot Hercules Geforce GTS. This was much easier then I expected it to be! Just push the two white pins through the holes and use a screwdriver to bump the cooler of the GTS chip.

As you can see the people from Guillemot did a pretty good job on getting thermal grease (mixed with glue to hold the sink firmly in place) spread out evenly. Of course it is not a good idea to apply thermal paste onto the chipset when it is still covered with leftovers from the previous cooler, so the chip had to be cleaned first.

This is what it looks like after cleaning it with some cleaning product.

Next I applied some thermal paste onto the Geforce 2 GTS chipset. It is very important that the entire chipset is covered with thermal paste as it will improve the cooling capability of the Blorb a

lot! I put a big drop of paste in the middle of the gpu (= Graphical Processing Unit) and then I spread it over the entire cip with my finger until it looked like this.

Now we are all set to install the Blue Orb onto the the GTS card. First I pushed the two pins through the Blue Orb, then I put the orb onto the videocard and I pushed both pins through the holes in

the videocard. That’s it … now the orb is installed :). Easy huh? Once you got past this step your board should look similar to this.

Congratulations, you have just succesfully installed the Blue Orb onto your videocard! Now lets see what this good looking cooler can do about our need for speed.

The Results

I already told you that I was able to overclock my GTS to 235MHz core and 405MHz memory. Thanks to the Blue Orb I was able to overclock my core all the way up to 250MHz, which was exactely what I was aiming for! Of course my memory was still running at 405MHz since the Blue Orb does not help to cool down the memory some more. Because the GTS cards are limited by their memory speeds, I knew that increasing of the core speed wouldn’t get me a lot more frames per second in Quake 3.

To show you what the difference between a 235MHz core and a 250MHz core, I decided to run Q3:A (of course!) and 3D Mark 2000.

Just like I predicted, the increase of core speed did not do a lot of good since the real problem is the memory speed.

Conclusion

Although the small improvement in the benchmarks, the Blue Orb is still a succes for me! It managed to get me another 15MHz of core speed and it also cools down the chip better. This is a good thing since heat is your hardware’s worst enemy. If you consider the price of this great cooler, I think you all should slap one on your videocard and/or motherboard chipset. And apart from cooling well, the Blorb also looks good! Definately a winner …

Good

- Easy installation

- Good performance

- Includes all necessary tools

- Price

- Looks good ;)

Bad

- None what so ever!