Thermaltake is one of the most popular companies developing all sorts of coolers for CPUs, chipsets and graphics chips. Very beautifully looking, available in various colors and modifications, these coolers have become an irreplaceable part of nearly every desktop PC. We have very often used Thermaltake coolers in our test systems, but very rarely reviewed them separately, considering all the slightest construction peculiarities and features.

Today we are going to make up for the lack of info on these important products and to offer you our review of the Orb family latest representative - Super Orb cooler.

Specification

As soon as we took a look at the specs of the cooler, which were listed on the shipping box, a really interesting question arose: why were these specs different from those we saw over on Thermaltake's official web-site? To tell the truth, we couldn't find any reasonable explanation on the spot. So, we would like to offer you both versions for consideration, and then you'll see, which one was closer to reality :-)

So, here are the specs of Thermaltake Super Orb cooler:

As you may see, the box and the web-site reported different fan sizes, noise levels and air volumes. In reality, Thermaltake web-site can be proud of reporting the correct fan size, while the noise level proved much higher than both sources had claimed. As far as the air volume goes, we couldn't find out the truth, because we lacked the necessary equipment. Anyway, hopefully Thermaltake may settle this puzzling situation.

And now let's take a really close look at Super Orb.

Closer Look

The cooler is shipped in an unusual hexagonal box, and makes a really favourable impression:

The cooler looks very similar to one of its predecessors, Chrome Orb. However, it is much "taller" than the latter. The photo below can give you a better idea of the size difference:

Having turned the cooler upside down, we were really surprised to see no thermal paste spot on the shining surface!

Instead we found two small packs of thermal paste inside the box. Here they are:

The major difference between Super Orb and Chrome Orb is certainly the dual-fan construction of our hero. The lower fan is just like the one used in Chrome Orb cooler:

While the upper fan represents a really interesting engineering piece:

The cooler is fastened to a stand, which is screwed to the upper edge of the heatsink in three places. The upper fan features more fan plates than the lower one and its plates are of a slightly different shape. This cooler is 50x14mm, which doesn't at all coincide with the dimensions mentioned on the box. Actually, the box is really worth mentioning separately. The thing is that it's decorated with a pic of a cooler with two absolutely similar fans rotating in different directions! Well, to tell the truth, it can be either a joke of a very smart artist who designed the box or a new word in aerodynamics…

What's the use of the second fan? Why on earth did they make such a huge heatsink for this baby? All of us who have ever dealt with any of the Thermaltake Orb coolers know that the upper part of the beautiful heatsink ribs feels cold and doesn't participate in the heat dissipation process even when the cooler is working hard. So why? Now we are going to find out how we could dissipate more heat from the cooler surface.

Certainly, as a solution, the air inlet could be located outside the PC case, however, it may spoil the looks of your system and make your computer a really noisy device, which is no good. The other way is to increase the surface of the heatsink, which is cooled by the airflow, however, the cross-section of the heatsink is already too large that's why there appear some problems with installing it onto certain mainboards. If the ribs get thinner you could increase the number of them and hence increase the heatsink surface, but in this case the cooler will work much noisier, because of the airflow getting through the numerous ribs.

There is only one possibility left: to increase the air volume going through the heatsink ribs per second. By simply rising the fan rotation speed, we will reduce its service time considerably and get a very ill-balanced system. The thing is that the fan plates are designed for some particular rotation speed and in case it gets higher, the effect made may turn out the opposite. Making a "sandwich" of two fans is also hardly of any use, because the lower cooler receives the already turbulent flow going from the upper cooler. If both coolers rotate at the same speed, they will simply prevent each other from working properly. If the rotation speeds of the two coolers are different, it may result into a positive outcome, however, they shouldn't be placed too close to one another then. In order to make the air flow become laminar, there should be some special barriers or a sufficient amount of free space between the two fans. This is exactly the thing that Thermaltake considered worth implementing.

Super Orb cooler is equipped with two fans working at different speeds. The upper one rotates at 4700rpm (though the specs claim 5000rpm) and directs the air flow to the lower fan. And the lower fan rotates at 6600rpm (though it is supposed to provide 5500rpm as to the specs). It is by the lower cooler that the airflow gets extra acceleration and then dashed in between the heatsink ribs, generating quite significant noise.

As a result, we get very good cooling effect accompanied by an unpleasantly high noise level. Later in the review we will see, how good the cooling actually is.

Cooler Fastening Hints

Sometimes the users can't install Chrome Orb and Super Orb coolers onto their mainboards as they should be, because of the mainboard design (when some elements appear in the way). So, they may feel like turning the cooler by 180 degrees in order to make it fit onto the board. No doubt, it is possible, but… take a look at the picture below:

The spot in the center of the cooler corresponds to the nominal (regular) case, and the thermal past spot moved to the side - to a non-standard situation. We carried out a simple experiment with the cooler fastened in both ways, in order to find out how the placement of the cooler influences its functionality.

In case of the "wrong" cooler fastening, it appeared less efficient for the CPU heat dissipation. The temperature differences made up to 10 degreed Centigrade, which is a really tangible value for the CPU. So, we don't think that the misuse of such a good and expensive cooler can be justified. That's why we suggest that you should make sure the cooler fits onto your mainboard before buying it.

If you want to avoid problems with the Chrome Orb and Super Orb cooler installation, you have to make sure that there are no elements located within 10mm from the outer socket edge. If you have the same components layout as on the photo below, the cooler fastening appears a difficult task to fulfill, because the cooler scratches the capacitors and theoretically can cause their breakdown.

Testbed and Testing Methods

We tested Thermaltake Super Orb cooler on the following system:

• AMD Athlon 700MHz and AMD Duron 600MHz;
• ABIT KT7 mainboard (kt7ul BIOS);
• Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 (GeForce2 GTS) graphics card;
• Fujitsu MPE3064AT HDD;
• 256MB (2 x 128MB) PC133 SDRAM by Hyundai;
• Windows'98.

At first we "warmed up" the CPU with the help of 3D Studio MAX 3.0 utility. The scene rendering took about 10 minutes and the temperatures were controlled by Motherboard Monitor 5.0. All the tests were run on a stand and not in a closed PC case. As for the fan rotation speeds, the numbers were taken from the ABIT KT7 mainboard BIOS.

For our investigation we used AMD Duron 600 CPU (1.6V Vcore), which was overclocked up to 700, 800 and then 900MHz, and AMD Athlon 700 CPU working at the same frequencies. During the CPU overclocking Vcore grew in the following way:

When the working frequency grew from 600 to 700MHz, Vcore remained unchanged, so that we could check whether the increase in core frequency could influence the CPU heating up. Then Vcore got 0.1V higher for every 100MHz.

After the test was finished, the testbed was switched off and the CPU and heatsink could cool down for 10 minutes. Then the new test took place.

Performance

We will compare Super Orb with one more cooler from Thermaltake - Chrome Orb, and with a very good noname ND-3 cooler, which you can see on the picture below:

First come the results obtained for AMD Duron CPU.

Here are the results (the numbers denote the minimal/maximal CPU temperature observed during the tests):

The diagram shows represents only the max values taken from the table to illustrate our statements:

The diagram shows that Super Orb provides better CPU cooling than Chrome Orb: 4-5^oC in all working modes. ND-3 cooler loses about 5^oC in modes providing low workload. However, the gap between ND-3 and the leader gets smaller as soon as the workload increases (frequency increase + Vcore increase). Besides, we would also like to pint out that Super Orb without the upper fan still looks much more attractive than Chrome Orb in case the workload is not too high. It is probably the higher rotation speed that tells (6600rpm against 5500rpm). However, as soon as the workload begins growing, the heat conductive features of the heatsink material start mattering more and more. Since both coolers are made of Aluminum 6063, the performance of both appears nearly equal.

Now let's consider the results we obtained with AMD Athlon CPU. Again first comes the table with both: maximums and minimums and then the diagram for the highest temperatures observed:

Even though L2 cache of AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) is four times larger than that of AMD Duron CPU, the Athlon is just a bit "warmer" than the latter. That's why the temperatures, which you can see in the charts are very close to each other.

Again, Super Orb managed to make the processor feel 4-5^oC better than in case of Chrome Orb cooler and 2-3^oC better than in case of ND-3 cooler. Without the second fan Super Orb again runs almost neck and neck with its Chrome brother.

Conclusion

Well, Super Orb cooler proved really super and is definitely worth your precious attention.

Highs

• Safe fastening mechanism; very unlikely to cause the die damaging;
• Universal retention mechanism, which makes the cooler suitable for Socket 7, Socket 370 and Socket A CPUs;
• Perfect processor cooling in any conditions.

Lows

• Large size, which prevents this cooler from fitting into such cases as InWin A500, for instance;
• Heavy weight, which is unsuitable for PC cases where the mainboard sits vertically;
• Disturbing noise;
• High cost.

As you see, this cooler features some really attractive highs, but it also has a couple of drawbacks as well. It will hardly become a very widely spread because of its relatively large cost, but it will undoubtedly win the hearts of most overclocking fans.