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Thermaltake Blue Orb
Needing no introduction, the "Blorb" has been reviewed countless times elsewhere..

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The familiar radial fins we're used to seeing on so many Thermaltake products including the big brother Super Orb and the original Golden Orb surround the second-largest fan in this roundup, powered by a 3-pin intelligent header. Thermaltake provide a few goodies in this full retail pack including a converter that lets you run the fan from a molex passthrough, some thermal paste AND some double-sided thermal tape. The Blorb is designed to fit the standard mounting holes but of course can be used on devices without them, thanks to the included thermal tape. The small pins in the left-hand photo above project through extensions on the heatsink base and go through the card or motherboard. They've got springloaded inserts which hold them in place making the Blue Orb by far the easiest to install. However, if you lost one of those springloaded clips, a replacement would not be as easily bodged together as with the Tennmax ones.

GlobalWin FAA20
I haven't seen this GlobalWin unit before - it looks pretty much like every other GlobalWin cooler, particularly the CPM25603-xx series from the PPGA days, but in miniature:

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A basic adonised-aluminium heatsink topped with a 40mm ball-bearing fan, this unit doesn't provide any means to attach to the mounting holes - instead providing a thin sheet of double-sided thermal tape. The fan is powered via a 3-pin intelligent connector.

MOS Cu Xtreme Chipset Cooler
Finally, we have the dark horse entrant in this comparo, the so-called MOS Cu Xtreme Chipset Cooler. VooDoo from MOS is very cagey about who actually makes the unit. I haven't seen them before so MOS are most likely the only people bringing them into the country - I guess this gives them naming rights :). Boasting a copper heatsink and (only just) the biggest fan of the comparo it certainly looks the business:

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The fan is powered by a 3-pin intelligent header. The copper of this unit is not as shiny as I'm used to, either it's badly tarnished (but scrubbing with methylated spirits didn't change the surface at all) or it's an alloy - I suspect with aluminium as it doesn't feel quite heavy enough to be solid copper. It doesn't have any mounting hardware, just a large double-sided thermal pad. This pad's a bit of a strange one, looking (but not feeling) like sandpaper on one side, all grainy and sparkly.. but on the other side looking like carbon-fibre, with the appearance of woven fabric. I'm in two minds about this pad, while the results show it to work well, it doesn't look like it would stay sticky after being installed and removed a few times. Having said that, after testing I noticed the pad has "bedded in" a little, and seems to become more sticky as the temperature rises. As stated previously I think offering both a sticky-pad and mounting-pins method is the best way to go, and this only offers one. I don't think it'd be too hard to modify it to accept some mounting hardware - there's certainly plenty of room - and I expect to spend an afternoon doing just that..

Here's a couple more shots of the unusual pad and the bottom of the unit..

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