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The Golden Orb is one of the most impressive-looking designs I've seen for a while in a socket cooler. I've seen a couple of reviews elsewhere and was very happy when Mihai contacted me to say he's importing them into Australia. I thought I'd compare it's performance to some of the other well-known socket coolers.

The unit itself is designed around a radial heatsink with the fan in the centre. The first heatsink of this kind that I saw was HP's PolarLogic coolers, originally designed to cool some of their high-performance CPU's but also released for consumer use. This unit is similar except the fins are much thinner. It's copper-coloured but I suspect, from the weight, that it's aluminium adonized with a coppery coating. Most of the mass is provided by the thick, solid base - from the surface that contacts the CPU to the base of the fan is a full 2cm of solid metal. This would serve as a huge heat sump and would absorb heat spikes from the CPU as it's load fluctuates. The unit is not too heavy, though - not enough to pull my unsecured slocket out of the slot1 connector, anyway. It's also very small, especially in terms of height off the socket - it leaves all 4 ram slots free on the Soyo SY-6VBA-133, a quite cramped motherboard, whereas the FDP-32 blocks 2 and rests against ram in the third slot. In fact, here's a comparison:

Look mum, no blocked RAM slots!

I pulled the unit apart to get a better look at the fan and was mildly surprised to discover it is made by Thermaltake as well. I'm more used to heatsink manufacturers such as Globalwin and Alpha using someone else's fans in their products. A quick look around the Thermaltake website explains this - they have been making fans and heatsinks for a couple of years now (with some success, income of $9M (presumably USD) is nothing to sniff at). This is their most adventurous design to date and has brought them out into the spotlight. But back to the fan - they claim 26 decibels which is (from memory) 10 less than the Y.S.Tech 60mm unit used on many of Globalwin's coolers. I'd say the difference is not that pronounced - remember, this is a logarithmic scale so 10dB is not trivial - the Golden Orb and the FKP-32 sound pretty similar from inside the case, the Orb having a slightly lower note. The Orb's fan is listed at pushing 20CFM (cubic feet per minute), 6 less than the Y.S.Tech. It has the 3-pin intelligent connector for RPM monitoring - it normally sits at just under 4500rpm. It's slightly different to the fan on some other Golden Orb reviews I've seen, in that it doesn't have the built-in black plastic shroud around the inner surface of the heatsink.