Results

The good old UK climate kind of spoiled my party here. With our generally low ambient temperatures, any case with moderately good cooling will suffice. What this meant is that No matter how many times I looped the Quake3 demo, or applied CPU intensive filters in Photoshop, I couldn't actually raise my core temperature more than 3 degrees higher than when it was idle. I didn't overclock the chip to add a little extra heat for reasons of time. Does this mean that nobody in a cool climate needs a monster cooler like the Super Orb? Well, yes and no. Your system may be quite happy with stock cooling, but I'm a big believer in "the cooler the better" where PC components are concerned. A well cooled chip will "tend" to be more stable, plus things like electro-migration (a very slow process where the CPU's internal tracks break down due to atoms "escaping" into the surrounding layers) are also slowed. it also gives you much more headroom should you decide to overclock your processor at some stage. I can get a good idea though from looking at the idle temperatures for both the stock Coolermaster HSF and the Super Orb.

To be honest, I always thought that 41 degrees was a pretty OK figure for my rig, which for the record consists of an Athlon (Tbird) 700 sat in an MSI K7T Pro board, but with the Super Orb in place, the results came as a bit of a shock. In both cases, I left the PC untouched for an hour before recording the details.

Gulp!! a seven degree difference is quite an achievement, and certainly more than I had expected to see, and that with the fan spinning at 4647rpm (what happened to the rated 5000rpm?) Again I looped Q3 and ran through some heavy Photoshop filters, and this time I was only able to get a 2 degree increase in temperature. The SORB must be doing something right.

 

Conclusion

What can I add here? I think the figures pretty much speak for themselves. The Super Orb is a well crafted and stylish cooling solution, and while the two fan layout does increase the overall noise levels from your PC, I certainly didn't find it in any way a problem. In fact I have heard single fans make more noise than the "SORB" throws out. Initially, I also wondered why they had not combined the two fans onto a single connector, but then I realised that having a separate feed for each meant that if one bit the dust, I wasn't going to fry my beloved Tbird. If (like me) your second fan header is too far away to connect to, then that's no problem, Thermaltake supply a pass-through so you can take a feed off your HDD or CDRom etc. or off a spare block from your power supply. The drawback with this of course is that you loose the RPM monitoring function on that 1 fan.

I should add here that the Orb was quite badly damaged when it arrived here, with many of the fins bent out of shape and the base and clip warped from what looked like quite a hefty knock. I don't blame Thermaltake for the clumsiness of the people who delivered it, but if you do buy one of these mail order, ask them to pad it well for you. I doubt the damage hindered performance in any way, but I did need a pair of pliers and a cloth to straighten out the bottom plate before fitting. I would also have liked to see a bit more length of cable from one of the two fans to allow it to reach a more distant fan header, but these are minor gripes and nothing that can't be overcome.

All in all I think the SORB is a fine option for anyone wanting a cool looking product cooling their cool new socket A processor. It works better than I could have hoped for considering the price, but if you want a cooler that operates amongst the very elite this is not really it. A fine option for those who value looks above out and out performance..