I'm tiered of the super orb being badmouthed!!

WHY??!! Why do you still hold a grudge against that poor H/S company??So you used the p3 disinged gorb for a socketA and crushed your core.... IT'S YOUR OWN BLOODY FAULT!! Do you not think if the golden orb were around after the socketA that it would have been desinged for 462?Of course it would have been! This is why they made the silver series for socketA. I have had a superorb on my duron 700 @ 1125 and 2.5 Vcore for months!!I've also removed it many times, probably on the 30th time by now.also when modified this cooler makes a great waterblock! there is practicaly no work involved at all. all you have to do is drill a hole in the block of the orb and vola! super tight waterblock! this thing has been able to keep my cpu at 47C and that is at 1125 with 2.5 VCORE! You have to give it some credit for that!So i see no reason why you people still hold a grudge against the poor cooler that is so versitile! It is great for a newbie because he/she can start out with it as a aircooler and then mod it to be a watercooler when their ready for it. This is also great for if your pump ever fails because when the water stops the super orb still acts as a air cooler. So all considering i think this is a great cooler! 8)

I started out with the Super Orb, it worked ok for me and I took it off and put it on about 15 times with out damaging my T-bird. I've since moved on to better things and my Sorb is now a paperweight but it served me well for awhile.

I don't have a grudge against thermaltake at all, there are just much better solutions on the market, and some are less dangerous. The orbs are very cool and sexy, but the design is showing some age. And the Sorb water block can in no ways compete with a dangerden block.

Though I have never owned any of the Orbs, my beef with them is this: From all the photographs of them I have seen, it looks like ThermalTake spent more design money trying to make them look sexy than in making them work effective. Look where the fins.pins are attached to the baseplate. Where do you think the hottest part of an HSF occurs. That's right, dead in the center, over top of the core. The Orbs may have been an effective OC'ing HSF for Intels, but I don't believe they are appropriate for OC'ing AMD CPUs.

Hoot

I also had my superorb on and off a dozen or so times never had a problem and it kept my 1.2 T-bird not OC under 50*c,I thinks its the operators that get to careless when intalling or removing hsf's.
But I do have a question how do you make a waterblock out of it by just drilling a hole?? I don't understand

i thought the super orbs are supposed to be awsome, i just read a comparison of 46 coolers at www.tomshardware.com .it did pretty good.

Blackearth (May 24, 2001 03:03 p.m.):
i thought the super orbs are supposed to be awsome, i just read a comparison of 46 coolers at www.tomshardware.com .it did pretty good.

Click to expand...

Yep, I have read that one too, and I don't get it either. Their result show that the Super Orb is better than coolers like the WBK 38 and the Alpha PEP66T!!!
Take a look here:

I really think something is wrong here....

The super orb is not always good. It sometimes really sucks on chips and on others it is awsome. For instance the orb is good on the Intel Line(for the most part) and on the AMD side they most of the time suck. Thunderbirds and Athlons most of all. It just depends. It is also known that the structure is not that great either because of the round shape.(Not being able to cover all the chip, including the outer core.) So dependign on the chip maker. They are not all good for everything, but some things...

-Epox MB- AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.2 Ghz- 256mb pc133 (crucial)-Radeon 64mb ddr-

I don't think that the super orb, and the chrome orb are bad heatsink/fans, but I do think they would work better if the base and the fins were one piece. Having gaps between them = bad heat transfer.

You know what I think would be cool? Cross-drilling a copper orb to make it a water block. That would probably have some sweet temps.

Hey cookedcomp, did you drill just one hole straight through?

I have a mini super orb on my kt7a board and I haven't had any problems keeping my 1.2 at 53load. t's only running at 10x133, but everything's stable. I don't see what is so hard about the clip. Sure it's tight, but it holds really good. I haven't had any trouble putting mine on, even for the first time. I think it works fine and I don't think anyone should avoid getting one if their only concern is the clip.

Perhaps the following will give an idea why the S/Orb is a poor product. I have one and used one. I did various tests with it and then replaced it with a G-W FOP 32-1. This is what I found. The Orb is light with a high surface area and in the tests I found that these attributes give it excellent radiation qualities which allow it to shed heat quickly and hence it compares favourably with other products. To really see what it does one must examine the heating phase of HS. It heats rapidly because of its lightness. In comparison with the FOP it heats up twice as quickly. I have been given other comparisons with other makes of HS and the same applies. Rapid heating gives rise to rapid expansion and I theorised that this would make the proc unstable during this phase. In oc'ing I found that my Duron 800 barely made the 1030 mark. When I used the FOP I achieved 1070 before I got the same result. I believe that this product is bad for any processor even if it is run at standard specs because of these rapid heating phases. I and others have also noticed that there are small areas on the face of the Orb where the aluminium has appeared to actually melt and it appears as a crystalline surface under magnification.