Low Profile Socket-A/Socket-370 Cooler Roundup - December 2001

Thermaltake Low Profile Orb

Installation

The Low Profile Orb uses the same twist-on clip as the first generation "Golden Orb". This makes the cooler incompatible with AMD CPUs, since the core of these CPUs could be damaged during installation. However, the Low Profile Orb would fit our simulator device without problems.

The Low Profile Orb comes with a preinstalled thermal pad, which we removed and replaced by thermal compound. The fan, which is integrated into the heatsink, cannot be reversed.

Performance and noise, conclusion

The performance of the Low Profile Orb was very deceiving. Why? At first we thought the heat transfer between our simulator and the cooler might be the problem, since the simulator simulates an AMD CPU (for which the Low Profile Orb isn't designed). However, upon further investigation, we noticed that during operation, the center of the heatsink was very hot, while the fins stayed relatively cool. So the real reason for the Low Profile Orb's poor performance seems to be the bad thermal transfer within the heatsink - no wonder, since the contact area between fins and base is very small, and there is no copper involved. Because of this design flaw, we expect that the cooler doesn't perform too well when used with an Intel CPU either.

We did not test this cooler in an 1U environment, since the temperature reached by the simulator during the "open space" test was already so high that we feared that the simulator wouldn't survive the 1U test with this cooler.

On the bright side, the Low Profile Orb was the quietest cooler in this roundup. Therefore, we recommend the Low Profile Orb only for applications where a CPU with very low power dissipation is being used, and where low noise is more important than good cooling performance.