The TGF020
"Blue Orb" is another Thermaltake product, and it's based on
the same radial fin design as the bigger Orbs. It's only about 5.5 centimetres
in diameter and about two centimetres high, though, and it's meant to be
used to cool motherboard northbridge chips (the ones that usually get a
little green passive heatsink), graphics card main chips, and so on. It
costs RM 60.00 , delivered.
Putting a better heatsink
on a motherboard chip isn't a bad idea if you've got one that runs hot -
dual processor boards, in particular, stress the northbridge more than it
may like. And, again, overclockers need more cooling - if you're running
higher-than-normal Front Side Bus speeds, the northbridge heats up.
Motherboards that use the
normal little-green-heat-sink on their northbridge chip hold them on with
a couple of simple spring-loaded split-pins, which are quite easy to remove
and replace with a pair of pliers. It's not a bad idea to pop the stock
heat sink off and add a dab of thermal grease under it, even if you're not
going to do anything else; most of the green-sinks are put on "dry" and
so achieve very little.
Many video cards also have
a couple of cooler mounting holes on either side of their main chip, even
if they don't actually use them for anything, and just have a cooler stuck
on with thermal cement or, more commonly, thin high-conductivity double
sided tape.
It's seldom very difficult
to remove even bonded-on coolers; a flat-blade screwdriver to lever it off,
and a piece of cardboard to protect the board from damage, usually does
it.
The Blue Orb gives you a
couple of mounting choices. The best method is using the supplied pair of
spring-pins.
The holes in the Blue Orb
base for the spring-pins are about 55 millimetres apart, which comes fairly
close to matching the hole spacing on various motherboards and video cards.
There's enough wiggle in the pins that you can tilt them in or out to match
slightly different hole spacing.
There's a little plastic
pack of thermal grease in the Blue Orb package, too, for people that use
the pin mounting.
If the pins don't match the
thing you're putting the Blue Orb on - its holes aren't spaced appropriately,
or it has no holes at all - there's a square of double-sided thermal tape
included, too.
Thermal tape's touchy stuff
- for decent conductivity, it needs to be very thin indeed, which makes
it easily damaged - but a decent-sized square of it like this isn't too
hard to deal with. Of course, if you want to re-use the Blue Orb, you'll
need more tape.
The Blue Orb has a three-wire
speed reporting fan, but it also comes with a four pin Molex plug passthrough
power adapter, which lets you use it in systems without a spare three pin
header. Using the adapter means you can't monitor the fan speed, but it
makes the cooler useable in anything with a standard PC power supply.
Joe Average doesn't need
the Blue Orb. But if you've got a basic-model video card that comes with
just a passive heat sink and no fan, a Blue Orb may let you crank its speed
up considerably further than you could with the stock hardware. And it should
do a better job of keeping motherboard chips cool than the usual solution
to the problem - just sticking a dinky fan on top of the plain green heat
sink.
