With the Orb's legs glued in place it was time to prepare the A7V. You will notice that I used electrical tape to cover the inductor, on the riser card, as the Orb comes into contact with it. I also taped around the holes in the board, top and bottom - just in-case I slipped and did some damage to the traces.

The 'protected' board (black tape) and inductor (red tape).

The tape protecting the bottom of the board (after the Orb has been bolted in place).

Now for the scary part, I'd heard and seen numerous cases of Duron killing coolers, and I could just see myself producing another one. With the Orb in place I used several washers to spread the load, and using the "light" test I made sure that the Orb was in contact with the core of the chip.

To tighten the Orb sufficiently I used a small socket from my socket wrench, and simply tightened it as far as I could before my fingers slipped. To be honest, the first couple of times the Epoxy had not fully set and I ended up pulling the bolt thread away from the Orb and having to start again - but at least I had yet to kill the Duron. I did panic a few times, working on-top of the bubble wrap and popping the bubbles as I rested the board edge on them!

The Orb securely in place.

So with the legs of the new Orb bolted up tightly, I installed a little fan on the 'greenie'. This also provided an attachment for the power cables for the Orb. The Orb it draws a reasonable amount of power (.22Amps) and I did not want to risk my Motherboard headers - even though the Orb was supplied with a 3pin connector.

The Orb is mounted, wired up - and ready to go.

Plugging everything in and crossing my fingers, I turned on my machine, and to my surprise it booted. The Panaflo fan is very quiet and the bulky heatsink provides quite good performance.

I wanted to know just how quiet the fan is - so I stuck my finger in it to stop it for a few seconds - and lots of blood and swearing later, I decided that was not a very good idea after all. The fan is quite solid and spins quite fast, while my finger was less solid and did not stop the spinning very well at all.

Don't stick your finger in the moving fans - this is not a pissy Golden Orb!
(Do you know how hard it is to take a decent pic of yourself bleeding?)

Under full load the CPU (default voltage and speed) is about 40°C, with the system temps at 25°C, however the Orb does not even feel warm to the touch. Due to the bulk of the heatsink the temperature changes are very slow - and I'd guess that it would make a good air cooler for a peltier system. I think that a copper cold plate may also distribute the heat from the core a little better, since the HP Polarlogic was originally designed for CPU's with a much larger surface area to cool.

So now comes overclocking my CPU, a peltier, and maybe a HSF comparison..