Here's the new kid on the teeny-cooler
block. The Orange Orb is made to do the same jobs as the Blue
Orb, but it's smaller and cheaper. Only $RM 60.00 delivered from
Malaysia PC Market.
Look at the two weeny-Orbs next
to each other and you can easily see the main difference between the two.
The Blue Orb's diameter is about 55mm not counting the two mounting tabs;
the Orange Orb is less than a millimetre smaller in that direction. But
the Blue Orb's fins stick up some 20mm from its base plate, while the total
height of the Orange Orb is less than 13mm.
This won't make any difference
if you want a cooler for a motherboard chipset, or perhaps for a low power
CPU in a rack mount case. But it can be significant when you're upgrading
video card coolers and want a bit more clearance between your cards.
The Orange Orb's fins are thicker
and shorter than the Blue Orb's, and there aren't as many of them. And its
fan is smaller, too. The Blue Orb's little fan motor draws about 140 milliamps
at 12 volts; that gives it about a 1.7 watt run power. The Orange Orb needs
less than 1.4 watts.
But, on the other hand, the
newer baby-orb's fins are angled for better air flow, and its heat sink
is all one piece, without any joints between the part in the middle that
the fan attaches to and the finned part around the outside. This gives the
Orange Orb a wider possible contact patch - about 38mm, though you may have
to lap down a slightly protruding fan mounting screw or two for really good
contact - and should mean that it gets heat into its fins more effectively.
And, as it turns out, the new
design works well. In my tests the Orange Orb scored 1.34°C/W, which is
just a hair worse than the Blue Orb's score. But the 0.01°C/W difference
between the two is the average of a few test runs, and the average difference
between successive tests of the same Orb was about 0.02°C/W. So I think
it's safe to say that they perform the same.
Smaller, lighter, cheaper, just
as good. What's not to like?
