To orb or not to orb

[John1975]

I have read quite a few posts from people who do not like orb heatsinks, but I have not found anything on why they are disliked. I have a golden orb in my comp and it seems to work well enough.
celeron 850@1183 today.

Can someone please tell me why orbs are so bad?

[The Doors]

Hi John1975, first of all, welcome to the Forum,
what are the Cpu temps of you system @idle & full load?

[John1975]

I think it is 28 c at an idle and around 46 under full load
I have a case fan and emermax power supply that keep case temps just a few degrees about room temp

[The Doors]

Well, Orb aren't good for the OC thing coz doesn't have a good thermal dissipation compared to many others HeatSinks, like many comparative tests shows, the retain clip sometimes can break the Cpu Core, and also you have to consider that without a good case airflow, and with a lot of peripherals, especially Scsi Hd (very Hot!), the temps are more higher than yours, that onestly are not so bad.

[zoopa_man]

Many people, including my self, dislike the way orbs clip onto your chip. The twisting motion that it takes to "lock down" an orb has killed many CPU cores. And I’ve always felt orbs are sold for beauty and show, not for serious cooling.

My .02 cents

[Yodums]

If that was an AMD Duron 850 you'd be complaining about temperatures but since its not then well thats a different story.

Orbs aren't very good at cooling they are made for looks IMHO.

People get bad performance since Orbs have such a bad clips which will just kill your core like TD said.

They aren't useful for AMD even with good airflow and you can't change the fan to anything better than the storm fan.

Yodums

[Sonny]

The older Orbs could never cool the hotter AMD CPUs & they used to have bad clips. There is one Orb however that can cool even an O/Ced AMD. The Dragon Orb 3+ Cu cools really well & has a great clip that uses all the lugs on the socket to mount. A lot of people will just say they suck because everyone else does. The best gauge for this is that if you can clock more with whatever HSF you choose to use the better the performer. If you have access to a good selection of HSFs then you are really better off looking at something from Swiftech or Alpha.

[LJ5L]

This is all elitist B.S. There is only so much that can be done with a slab of aluminum and a fan. Some combinations are better than the others, but only marginally... and even then the results are more likely to be different because of the amount of aluminum and different speed fans; not design.

Now, a golden orb is a decent heatsink. The mounting hardware straight from factory certainly needs trimming with a dremel, but after that it's smooth and mounting pressure is actually variable.

And from personal experience it cools very nice.
First let me say: I lowered the fan speed on mine to 3000rpm from stock 4500+, so that's about a 50% air flow loss right there, yet it still keeps a Celeron 850 (100FSB) @ 1.14ghz (133FSB) @ 35C full load. It goes quiet higher than that with that heatsink but keeping PCI in specs is my idea of stable.

[CrystalMethod]

My Gorb cooled worse than my stock Intel HSF (lapped). I then tried lapping the gorb to see if it would improve, but I got only a 2°C drop in temps. If you feel you really need a comparison, I can put it on, take screenshots and show you that this is not "elitist B.S". Heck, I'll even run at stock speed, and disconnect my case ventilation fans.

[The Doors]

Originally posted by LJ5L
This is all elitist B.S. There is only so much that can be done with a slab of aluminum and a fan. Some combinations are better than the others, but only marginally... and even then the results are more likely to be different because of the amount of aluminum and different speed fans; not design.

Now, a golden orb is a decent heatsink. The mounting hardware straight from factory certainly needs trimming with a dremel, but after that it's smooth and mounting pressure is actually variable.

And from personal experience it cools very nice.
First let me say: I lowered the fan speed on mine to 3000rpm from stock 4500+, so that's about a 50% air flow loss right there, yet it still keeps a Celeron 850 (100FSB) @ 1.14ghz (133FSB) @ 35C full load. It goes quiet higher than that with that heatsink but keeping PCI in specs is my idea of stable.
Please what are your ambient temp?! coz I've used this HS on a P/// 800EB and the temps was totally different.

[LJ5L]

21.5-22.5C outside case. The case flow is quiet good though.

p.s. just saying my name would of been enough to direct it to me ;)

[The Doors]

Well, at this point it's for sure a surprise for me, coz with those temps, the Gorb is supposed to have a C/W of 0.35-0.40 considering that have to dissipate about 40W, and the temps are 13.5-12.5 degree C up to the ambient, so really close to many copper HS, and better of a Volcano 6CU+ :eek: what kind of program you use to get a 100% load?

[cyberey66]

I bought a gorb back when i had a celeron 433, to bad they didn't tell you it needed modding before using it. It destroyed my slocket. Well as for cooling, I lapped mine but since the fan died I can't test it. I was going to stick it on my vid card, but I need to find a replacment fan.

All in all the orb isn't that bad cooling, just there are a lot of better hs/f's now. I think it's major problem is it's lack of mass and surface area to draw away the heat.

[LJ5L]

Doors: I just used Photoshop for the test, opened up a few hundred MB file and applied some effects filter which would take hours to complete. But remember the case has very good air flow, I even had the heatsink running even without a fan for months @ 1ghz with comparable full load results, as that fan was the louder part of the PC.

[The Doors]

Well, I must admit that you get really Great results with your Case fans set, a friend of mine with the same HS on a Cellie 1Ghz@1130Mhz 1.75v have temps around 45-50 degree C @ full load folding with UD, but he's still working on the airflow into the case ;)

[rogerdugans]

I have used "lesser"orbs and gotten decent results.

My biggest complaint/ worry was the fan: I heard from quite a few people about a tendency to break blades off during operation. At the time I was often out of town for work for 2, 3 even 4 weeks at a time- that would be disaster for an overclocked Athlon! So I have stopped using them. But here is a funny thing: after changing from that to a Thermoengine (not great, but available locally) my temps went UP about 4 or 5c! Took quite a bit to get the temps back down too.