Back in the days when overclocking really started to become popular Thermaltake were well known amongst the enthusiast crowd for their Golden Orb cooler. This heatsink was released roughly six years ago now and I still remember installing it for the first time. Back then there was not a huge variety of after market cooling products. Furthermore, there were few that looked as impressive as the Golden Orb. Personally, I found the performance of the Golden Orb to be quite average and it made quite a racket.
Nevertheless, the product still sold well thanks to its unique appearance. The product was also marketed well and could be purchased just about everywhere for a reasonable price. Although the Golden Orb did feature a unique design, it was actually much like a cooler designed by Agilent Technologies. The Aligent Arctic cooler was actually released before the Golden Orb and although it did not appear to be as flashy, it offered better cooling performance.
Thermaltake tried to recapture the Golden Orb success over and over again with products such as the Super Orb, Blue Orb, Dragon Orb and Chrome Orb. Finally, Thermaltake moved away from the Orb theme and went with more traditional design methods. Although I found the performance of the Golden Orb quite average, this was not such an issue as the Intel Pentium III processor did not generate massive amounts of heat. However, the AMD Thunderbird processors were quick to turn the heat up and expose poor performing cooling solutions.
Now 5~6 years later we find ourselves just 2~3GHz faster and cooling has become even more of a problem. In order to really overclock today's high-end processors properly, users are required to use liquid cooling solutions. Unfortunately, high-end air-cooled computers have enough trouble maintaining a safe operating temperature at standard frequencies. Given the costs involved in building a high-end system, the heat it will produce and the noise it makes trying to stay cool, I am almost surprised anyone bothers.
For this reason slower, quieter and cooler computers have now become the ?in thing?as they are more suited to most environments. Just recently I discovered that Thermaltake were planning on releasing a new version of the Golden Orb, know simply as the Golden Orb II. When I first saw the design I could not help but be a little disappointed. The cooler looks much like a value alternative to the Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu which has been available for quite some time. Just like Zalman's CNPS7000B-Cu the Thermaltake Golden Orb II is being marketed as a low-volume solution. Today I actually have a sample of the Golden Orb II and will be putting it on the test bed for a full analysis.
