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Mounting
Being a socket cooler it can of course be used to cool a wide range of CPU's, from Coppermine P3's through PPGA Celerons, classic Pentiums and AMD's K6 chips - almost any socketed x86 chip. Socket3 (486's) and below, however, lack the central lugs required to hold the cooler's clips on. There is a small square of thermal paste in the middle of the heatsink's base, suspiciously coppermine-sized - it's not really enough if you're going to use the cooler on a PPGA chip, get yourself some thermal paste and use that. Also the base, being circular and slightly off-centre once mounted, is not quite large enough to cover all of a PPGA Celeron's corrners - a tiny portion of 2 corners protrudes. I don't think it will make a huge difference, their website lists it as PPGA-compatible and after my testing the unit was very hot to the touch, so there's obviously no problem getting heat off the CPU and into the heatsink.

Thermaltake have used a special clip to mount this unit onto the socket and it deserves a mention. It's one of the best attachment ideas I've seen in that it allows easy installation and removal but provides an incredibly tight attachment, which is vital to good thermal transfer. Here's a step-by-step look at it:

The unit has a removable, swivelling ring
with clips for attaching to the socket, and
pins from the heatsink thread into the ring

The pins pull the ring (and hence the socket and CPU) firmly up against the heatsink when you rotate the unit on the socket. You reverse the twist to pop the unit off.

The first time I attached the unit to the socket I was quite concerned at just how hard you have to twist it. Holding the slocket in one hand and the heatsink in the other, you have to apply an amount of force well beyond what I'm comfortable using on computer gear. However, after a couple of goes the unit was much easier to apply, having been "broken in", if you like.

Performance
So - how does it perform? My usual testbed was employed, a Celeron 400 @ 600MHz @ 2.3v, which really pumps out the heat. This sits in an MSI 6905 v1.1 slocket in a Soyo SY-6VBA-133 motherboard, which can monitor the CPU's internal temperature diode. All this sits in a Macase K10 midtower case with the case-front fan on. Testing consisted of 20 minutes of Unreal Flyby with SETI@HOME running in the background to catch any spare CPU cycles. After each test the heatsink and CPU were cleaned, new thermal paste applied and the case allowed to cool. The ambient temperature was 25.5C.

Why did I not use a FC-PGA chip for the testing, you ask? Well, to be honest, because I don't have one here at the moment. But realistically, the heat load from FC-PGA is much less due to the lower voltage than PPGA, so this test should show up any differences or inefficiencies more clearly. The results:

Conclusions
Well, once again a small cooler surprises us. This cooler is definitely in the same league as much larger coolers. There's not a spectacular price difference - the FDP and FKP are usually just under the AUD$40.00 mark. However, at AUD$33.00 (plus shipping from Western Australia) these units are quite a bargain. They're also ideal if you're short on space. Keep in mind, though, that they are quite wide at the base - for example, the dreaded capacitors on the BP6 foul these heatsinks badly - they can be modified to fit (with a Dremel or similar) but don't as stock. If your motherboard is tight for space around the socket consider the FKP-32. The Golden Orb should fit most slocket adapters fine and I'd be surprised if they blocked ram slots on any motherboard.

Mihai, who is bringing these into Australia, can be contacted by email at GoldenOrb@australiamail.com or by phone on (Australia) (08) 9444 9549. He'd prefer to be contacted by email. US-based readers can get them from Plycon.com.