Best Of Socket A Coolers
Thermaltake popular for their ORB’s recently unveiled their latest innovation, the mini Copper Orb. A solid copper bases core sits in the centre covered by a circular aluminium shell. Thermaltakes early releases like the Super Orb were the centre of much discussion, as they didn’t fit into many mainboards out there. This time round Tt has reduced the diameter of the Mini Copper Orb to make sure it fits into most boards. We couldn’t fit the cooler into the ECS K7VZM due to the placement of resistors around the CPU socket. It fit in fine with our DFI board.
What was common with past Orb’s by Thermaltake was that they were only good for CPU’s running at their default speed. Any kind of overclocking and they were, well simply putting it, Pathetic. I think one of the main reasons for these coolers fail is due to the fact that Tt does not include powerful coolers into them. A 60×60 Delta can turn most ordinary coolers into high-performing ones with ease.
Initial impressions of the cooler looked very nice indeed. (As always). The copper base plate was smooth and flat. A 50×50 fan spinning at 5000RPM produces a total of 23CFM. Not bad, but certainly could be better. Once again Tt seems to have made the mistake of not installing a powerful fan in their Orbs. Early editions of the Mini Copper Orb came with frag tape on the bottom (Very bad idea). So now they ship it with a small sachet of Silicone compound. However as stated before if you plan on extreme overclocking use Arctic Silver II.
Installation
Tt uses the same type of clip they have used in the past. It’s not as easy as the compression clips of the MC370-A, nevertheless you can get it in with no problems.
Testing
Same tests were carried out as in the other coolers. Duron 700 was Overclocked to 1000MHz.
Conclusion
Now that’s hot folks. It’s sad to see even a solid cooper base couldn’t do much to keep the heat down. I’m pretty sure this is mainly attributed to the poor power of the cooling fan. The cooler might do better if you modify the heatsink by installing a Delta or Sanyo Denki cooling fan. It’s quite strange to see Tt rating this cooler for CPU’s up to 1.5Ghz. If at 1000Mhz the temperature ranges at 48°C, at 1.5GHz the temperature is bound to reach dangerous levels. It’s sad but we certainly cannot recommend the Mini Copper Orb for extreme overclocking. It’ll be fine for normal usage, however it’s a poor performer under Overclocked conditions. We hope Thermaltake look into these drawbacks soon and produce something that could compete with the high-end cooler market.
