ThermalTake Super Orb

I’m sure that you’ve read ThermalTake’s story hundreds and hundred’s of times so I won’t bore you by going over the whole thing again. Thermaltake’s Golden Orb killed many a Socket A processor before ThermalTake brought out it’s Chrome Orb. But the first Chrome Orb also turned out to be a killer, as did the second revision. The third revision took advantage of the little rubber feet on the Duron and T-Bird, making sure that contact between the heatsink and die was stable and even. But the Chrome Orb was not a wonderful performer. It did the job, but not particularly well. To remedy this, Thermaltake produced the Super Orb, a dual fan monster designed to cool Socket A processors up to 1.5Ghz. Kenny from ThermalTake was kind enough to send me one of these beasts. The Super Orb also has to win the style award, along with best box.

Specs:
Dimensions : 69dia x 74 mm tall
Top Fan:
Rated Voltage : 12VDC
Rated Speed : 5500 RPM
Air Flow : 25.45CFM
Noise Level : 32dB(A)
Bearing Type : Ball Bearing

Bottom Fan:
Rated Voltage : 12VDC
Rated Speed : 5000 RPM
Air Flow : 17.3CFM
Noise Level : 34dB(A)

Installation:
Unlike the other coolers, the Super Orb came with a small packet of thermal compound. I used mine however, to maintain a fair test. Later I tested with the ThermalTake compound and found no difference. The Super orb is very tall and quite wide, meaning it will not fit onto some motherboards. These include the popular Abit KT7, where capacitors get in the way. The A7V has no such problem however, as all the capacitors are on a riser card. Installation was a simple clip and push affair, but a fairly large amount of force was required to get the clip onto the socket. As there are 2 fans, you need 2 fan headers. If you only have one, you can connect the 2nd fan to a standard 4 pin connector using the supplied adapter/passthrough.

Removal:
This has to be the low point of the Super Orb. Taking the bastard off is a real pain. It took me 10 minutes the first time I tried, and I was applying a hell of a lot more force than I was happy with to push the clip down to remove it. Finally I got the thing off, and managed to scrape a few millimeters of plastic off the socket itself. I then looked at my Duron and found one of the little rubber feet was coming apart. I put some glue on it and went back to testing. After the final round of testing I removed the Super Orb for the third time in 2 days. I took it off and cleaned off my Duron to re-apply the pencil on the L1 bridges. Close inspection showed that the little rubber foot that was falling apart before was in worse condition, and that the corresponding corner of my duron has a few little bits missing. I booted up and found my system reporting voltage spikes and constant crashing. Then my system wouldn’t even boot. That’s right, the Super Orb killed my Duron. But don’t get me wrong, the Super Orb is a quality product, and I’m sure if I had taken a lot more time and care I wouldn’t have killed my processor, but the Super Orb is really hard to remove!

Performance:
Idle : 36 Load : 42
As you can guess the dual fan beast gives the best result. The Super Orb is a really good heatsink for the price, and gives excellent results.

Cost:
$49 for the heatsink. It’s a pretty good price, and you get what you pay for. The Super Orb could be your ticket to that extra 100Mhz. Just be careful during installation, as I know, having to shell out an extra $300 for a new processor isn’t the most fun thing to do.

[Note from Agg: I've been installing/removing a Super Orb on an A7V pretty regularly and more recently on a FIC AZ11E - I found it tricky to attach and remove, but a small flat screwdriver helps a lot - be careful not to slip and scratch tracks on the mobo with the screwdriver! I'm not arguing with Jeff here - there's been a lot of crunched SocketA cores and I'm sure the Super Orb has done its fair share of killing. Be careful, make sure you only press on the clip and not the heatsink itself, hopefully you'll have my kind of luck and not Jeff's..]

Performance Comparison

Test setup:

AMD Duron 600 @ 900 (9.0 x 100) @ 1.80V
Asus A7V Motherboard
128 Meg Nova PC 133 Cas2
Powercolor Geforce 2 MX
15 Gig Quantum Fireball LM 10.2
Procase PC-808 Mid-Tower

Load readings were taken after a 1 hour loop of 3dmark2000 and playing Q3:A for 1 hour while running SETI in the background. The case temp was 30degrees Celcius and all temperatures taken using Asus Probe. The case has one slot Vacuum fan, all tests were run with the side panels removed.

Before we begin I must explain the A7V’s very high idle temperatures. The 1004 version BIOS does not HLT the CPU when it is not working, so the CPU does not cool down as it is still being fed instructions to process. This results in very high idle temperatures. This will hopefully be remedied in future Asus BIOSes.

When it comes down to it, I recommend the Super Orb, it gives the best results, isn’t very expensive and looks very stylish.