Thermaltake Blue Orb:
(aka "BLORB")

Date Reviewed: October 15, 2000
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel
Company: Thermaltake
Company URL: http://www.thermaltake.com
Cost: $12.99 USD (at Plycon)

First Impressions:

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The need for better cooling on video cards & motherboards has led to the invention of the Blue Orb from Thermaktake. Apparently the Blue Orb is going to be sold in a more retail style package that includes lots of extra goodies. Along with getting the standard Blue Orb that has a 3-Pin connection, you also get a 3-pin to 4-pin adapter (a nice hooded one I might add), some standard heatsink compound (the same one found in Alpha heatsink packages), a thermal pad, and two plastic pins.

The Blue Orb is 15mm tall so it will cover the PCI slot adjacent to your AGP slot, which is okay in most respects since that PCI slot is a shared IRQ with the AGP slot. You can see in the picture below exactly how much it blocks the PCI slot. The Orb is about 50mm in diameter, which is just the right size when I fitted it on both GF2MX & GF1DDR video cards.

The fan is of course made by Thermaltake also, and is rated at 4600RPM & 15CFM. It's a ball-bearing fan rated for 50,000 hours MTBF so you know it's not going to die on you any time soon. Still if you have a dust problem in your case, it's always recommended to clean it our regularly with a can of compressed air. (take your computer outside first or the dust will just get sucked back in your computer.) One great thing I noticed about the blue orb is that it is very silent, the fan is rated at 26dba which basically added no extra noise over my power supply fan & YS-Tech on the CPU. Here's the spec's in a chart form for you people that like it like that:

Installation:

Like I said before, Thermaltake includes the ability to mount the Blue Orb using push-pins (which gives the ability to use thermal compound between GPU & HS), or if you don't have any holes on your card they include a piece of thermal tape to mount it with. After doing a little sizing, the Blue Orb only really fits holes that are more of the offset style around the core (Basically the equivalent of the Tennmax style B, read that review to see what it looks like). It doesn't really fit the diagonal hole style which is more common on motherboards without a little homestyle rigging...

I *did* have to file a little around one of the pin holes on the Orb because I had something on my GF2MX card that was very close to the mounting hole, but that's no big deal, I had to do it with my Tennmax Lasagna BGA cooler too. You may or may not have to do this for your particular video card.

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