Thermaltake can be noted for having been very active recently in developing and promoting various cooling systems under its brand. Not long ago we wrote about a series of new air coolers from the company; its products have also performed successfully in our water-cooling systems roundup. To all appearances, Thermaltake takes the latter direction as a priority for today. Just take a look at the list of new products on the company's website and you will see water-cooling solutions rather than traditional coolers being in focus there. I don't mean air coolers are completely forgotten, yet Thermaltake seems to be ready to get firmly established on the market of water-cooling systems as none other manufacturer can offer as extensive product range as Thermaltake's.
We have been lucky to get one new air cooler and five water-based coolers (three new ones and two updates) from Thermaltake for this review. At least two of the water-cooling solutions feature a unique design and it's hard to foretell their market future just because they may prove too uncommon even for lovers of exotic products.
The air cooler is a kind of special guest. Thermaltake has decided to restore the once-famous Orb brand and has released two new models: Golden Orb II and Blue Orb II. We unfortunately couldn't get a sample of the former, but are looking forward to get one soon. But without any more introductions let's get right to the coolers to be tested.
Testbed and Methods
It's easy to test a liquid-cooling system. Putting aside the problems of assembly and filling, you don't need a real system case as a testbed: you don't have to deploy the cooling system in a system case to check its efficiency since the heat is transferred to the outside anyway. As for the assembly procedure, there's not much sense in verifying how the system deploys since this will largely depend on the type and internal design of a particular system case.
So, we tested the performance of the reviewed coolers using the following hardware parts:
- Intel i955XBK mainboard
- Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 3.2GHz CPU (Smithfield core)
- 2 x 512MB Samsung DDR2 SDRAM
- Sapphire Radeon X800 XL 256MB graphics card
- Western Digital WD1600JB hard disk drive
- Zippy HP2-6460P power supply
There were two test modes: Idle and Burn (with two copies of CPU Burn running). The graphics card was loaded by running Unreal Tournament in 1280x1024 resolution, in 32-bit color, at the maximum graphics quality settings and with turned-in 4x full-screen antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. The temperature of the CPU was read with Intel Desktop Utilities version 2.1 which is supplied with the mainboard. The temperatures of the GPU and the graphics card's PCB were read with RivaTuner.
The room temperature remained constant at 20ò¾ throughout the tests. The same brand of thermal paste was used with all the tested cooling systems.
The level of noise is evaluated subjectively and is specifically mentioned for each cooler. If it is possible to adjust the fan speed, we test the system at different fan speeds, depending on the system's capabilities.
