Reviewed By: Carl 'lowlight' Nelson [02.19.01]
Manufactured by: ThermalTake
Suggested Price: $25 

Thermaltake is About to Erupt!

The Mini Super Orb Review marks our 6th Thermaltake product reviewed! We have pretty much every one of their coolers covered now, except the P4 coolers.

I'll start off with a basic roundup of our experiences with Thermaltake's Orb products:

• Golden Orb - The original cooler that made Thermaltake famous.  This cooler is all but out-of-date now.  I wouldn't suggest picking one up anymore, but in their time, they were great for the cooler P3 chips, such as the P3 500... Old news now, however.

• Chrome Orb - As soon as Thermaltake started hearing of people crushing their AMD Durons and Thunderbirds with the Golden Orb, they redesigned it and released it as the Chrome Orb.  It now fits those AMD CPUs, and they also improved on some things.  They put a better fan on it, and it has a smoother surface.  It cools better, and if you want a good middle-end cooler on the cheap, definitely look into a Chrome Orb.

• Super Orb - Currently the most expensive orb you can get (at $25.. gee).  It is basically a Chrome Orb that is double the size and has two fans, on top of one another.  This makes for a very unique cooler, and it performs quite well for its price.  The two fans make it quite loud however.

• Blue Orb - This is a great little chipset/video card cooler! Definitely better than the stock heatsink that comes with most video cards.  It comes with everything you need to install it on any video card.  Highly recommended!

• Volcano II - Thermaltake rates their fan at 36 CFM, and it is spinning at a quiet 4500 RPM.  This cooler can be found for as little as $15.  This makes it a cheap, quiet, and decent performing cooler.

If It's Broke... FIX IT!

As you know, the Super Orb is basically a beefed up Chrome Orb.  While we find the Chrome Orb to be severely lacking for our needs, the Super Orb, with its two fans uniquely vertically placed on top of each other, performed quite well.  This is NOT to say that it is in the league of say, a Copper Hedgehog, or some GlobalWin or Alpha coolers.  It is, however, much cheaper than most coolers that perform about as well.

As we noted in our original Super Orb Review, some users had problems installing it on boards that place the electrolytic capacitors close to the CPU socket (such as the extremely popular Abit KT7 series boards).

We're going to see if the Mini Super Orb is more functional with the KT7-RAID motherboard, while maintaining the cooling capabilities of the original Super Orb.

In the package, you'll get a tube of heatsink paste (thank god they stopped using that crappy thermal interface pad!), and a 3-pin-to-4-pin adapter.  Everything you need to get cooling right away!

So does this one fit on the KT7 RAID?