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Thermaltake DuOrb CPU Cooler Review

Jason Landals
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“Go big or go home!”


This macho saying has many dubious applications, but it’s quite at home in the world of CPU coolers. When cooling with air the more surface area you have, the more heat you can dissipate. So Thermaltake’s latest DuOrb CPU cooler, which sports two fans and two heatsinks, should be at the top of the heap right? I guess that depends on what part of the heap you look at.

The CPU heatsink market is overflowing with huge CPU coolers that boast a great deal. Unfortunately these coolers tend to come up short in one of two areas; they either don’t live up to specifications or they are just too tall to fit into most enclosures. Thermaltake has always been known for decent CPU coolers, and they have taken a different approach to the dual fan CPU cooler.

The Thermaltake DuOrb is a monster cooler, sporting dual 80mm fans mounted in their own radial heatsinks. Unlike many other dual-fan heatsinks, the Thermaltake DuOrb has it’s fans pointing down towards the motherboard. This provides for additional cooling towards the RAM, VRM, Northbridge, and the back of the video card. Thermaltake says this should make the cooler no taller than some single fan units, though I’m curious how well it’ll fit into our test system. Anyhow, here’s a quick run-down of the features. Full specifications can be found on the product home page.

  • Extension of DuOrb Cooler Design
  • Copper base, Heatpipes and fins
  • Six Distinct Designed Heatpipes
  • Mirror Coating Copper Base
  • Double-Sided Radiant Heatpipes Penetrating Fins
  • Blue and Red LED Lights Fans
  • Dual 80mm Silent Fans
  • Smart Thermal Management

As for pricing, the Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler rings in at the higher end of the spectrum. You should be able to find it at a street price between $60 and $70 USD. This places it in the same price range as the best from companies like Zalman and Cooler Master. Still how does it compare with such heatsinks? We’ll have to find out, after checking out the cooler and what accessories come with it.

Whats In The Box?

The DuOrb CPU cooler includes the mounting equipment required for Socket LGA 775 (Intel) and Socket AM2/AM2+ (AMD). Both installations will require the removal of your motherboard, as there’s a plastic mounting plate included to support the weight of the cooler. The instructions are fairly concise, and should allow all but the most n00bish to install the DuOrb with ease.

Visual Inspection

The Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler is fairly large, combining two fans mounted on dual radial heatsinks. These two heatsinks have fins made of both aluminum and copper. This aides in cooling, as the aluminum pulls the heat away from the CPU quickly, and moves it to the copper where it is evenly dissipated just as quickly. The fins themselves are quite thin and plentiful, creating a lot of surface area to further increase cooling. The detail work is similar to another heatsink that we’ve tested in the past called the Thermaltake V1 which sports the look of an oriental folding fan.

The height of the heatsink has two benefits. The first being that once the heatsink is lifted above the motherboard, to where it clears all the supporting electronics around the CPU socket, it can increase surface area up to the limit of the size of the enclosure used in the system. The second benefit is that the fans should cool the afore mentioned supporting devices around the CPU. This means the CPU cooler should also aide in cooling the northbridge, VRM, RAM, and possibly the back of your video card.

The fans themselves are 80mm in size, and spin at 2000 RPM. Each fan produces 38 CFM of airflow, and produces 21 dBA of noise. Each fan lights up a different colour, with one illuminated in a cool blue and the other ignited in fire red. The entire contraption weighs 598g.

The base of the DuOrb is supposed to be a mirror finish. However when we removed the protective cover from the bottom of our review unit, a film was left from the cover. This is easily removed using some rubbing alcohol, and once cleaned off the copper is indeed polished to a brilliant mirror finish.

Heat is transferred from the base through six heatpipes into the fins of the DuOrb cooler. This is what allows the DuOrb to raise itself above the motherboard. That being said, the mounting brackets used to hold the heatsinks to the base may interfere with the stock installed passive heatsinks found on the components of many motherboards. We’ll have to see how well it fits with our test motherboard.

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Installation

I installed the Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler in my standard test rig, which has been wrapped in a brand new enclosure. Here’s a rundown of the pertinent specifications.

Hopefully the parts selection above puts the hurt down hard enough for us to tell if the DuOrb is decent…or not.

Installation went without a hitch. Once I removed the motherboard, I was able to install the mounting bracket without issue. This was important, as the DuOrb does still block some connectors on our test motherboard. Most notably it blocks the 8-pin power connector near the top of the board. Once the mounting bracket was installed, I was able to drop the motherboard back in, connect the required cables, and mount the DuOrb heatsink. So overall, not as big a deal as I had initially anticipated.

Other then some minor cabling issues, there was little problem with the fit of the DuOrb on our test motherboard or in our test case. The aforementioned brackets didn’t interfere at all with the motherboard-bound heatsinks of the installed RAM, though if you are using any modules with the raise heatsink design like CORSAIR Dominators or OCZ FlexXLC modules, you may want to rethink the purchase of this heatsink as it will not clear.

The only fit issue I could identify with our test installation of the DuOrb was shown in the instructions. Basically if the mounting holes for a motherboard are configured a certain way the cooler will have to be mounted vertically, cutting off the standard position of the x16 PCIe slot normally occupied by a video card. Since this is not an acceptable proposition, you will need to double check current motherboard layout before considering this cooler as it clearly isn’t totally universal with all setups.

Thankfully that wasn’t the case with our test system. Once installed and powered on the DuOrb made itself right at home, going straight to work on cooling my system. The red and blue lights aren’t an indication of anything; they’re just a cool effect added by Thermaltake. Anyhow since installation was problem free in our case, it’s time to try to create some problems with testing.

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Testing

To test the Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler, we let the system idle for 30 minutes to capture the idle temperature. Then using SiSoftware Sandra we ran all four cores at 100% for 60 minutes to get the load temperature. Now we’re going through a bit of a heat wave in the city, which means my office was at an ambient temperature of 28°C. This will of course skew results higher then normal, but it’ll also provide a decent challenge to our review cooler.

For comparison sake we ran the tests on both the DuOrb and the last cooler I reviewed, which was the Cooler Master Hyper 212. For thermal compound, I used Gelid’s GC1 High Performance Thermal Compound, letting it set for 24 hours prior to benchmarking.

The first thermal test I decided to run was the CPU, being that this is a CPU cooler. The Thermaltake DuOrb beat out the Cooler Master cooler by 3°C at idle. When measuring load temperatures, the results scaled linearly as there was a 3°C difference between the coolers once again. This isn’t the greatest of performance differences, but it’s decent for a stock clocked quad core Phenom CPU. That being said, these differences would disappear once the processor was overclocked. However with the DuOrb, CPU cooling isn’t the end of the story.

With a cooler like the DuOrb, and Thermaltake claiming that it may aide in cooling of incidental components like the chipset and VRM, we just have to do further testing. Well it turns out that the Thermaltake DuOrb did aide in cooling the chipset under both idle and load. The DuOrb posted a 2°C improvement at idle, and a 4°C difference under load. This was the only incidental component affected that I could measure. There was no effect on the RAM, VRM, or the back on the video card.

The final set of tests performed on the DuOrb were to poke and prob at its acoustics and to see if the dual 80mm fans added any additional noise to our test rig. Here’s what we came up with:

  • Left Panel (Window): 47.2 dBA
  • Right Panel: 46.8 dBA
  • Rear: 48.8 dBA

If these numbers look familiar, they should. These are the exact same results posted in our review of the NZXT Tempest midtower case. For those who still haven’t caught on, that means that the Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler is quiet enough that it didn’t affect the acoustic profile of our test system one iota. I spun up our CPU tests once again, and the dB Meter didn’t even flinch while the processor was under load. Overall I would say this is good cooler when it comes to thermals and acoustics. Now let’s sum it all up and get the heck out of Dodge.

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Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Though I am impressed by the performance of the Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler, I’m still somewhat staid in my praise for this product. To call it the be all and end all of CPU coolers is incorrect, but to relegate it to my “sell on eBay” pile isn’t right either. When it comes down to it I’m left ticking off things on my checklist, so here we go.

The DuOrb has a fair degree of pluses in its favour. Its thermal testing results showed promise, with ok numbers posted in CPU testing and good numbers in Chipset cooling. The size of the cooler gives it an advantage in that it can disapate heat over a large area. The installation was easy enough, with the added benefit that I could mount the heatsink with the motherboard in the case. The downside is that the DuOrb isn’t completely universal as there are circumstances where it simply cannot be installed without giving up a PCIe x16 slot or with performance memory modules that use extended heatsinks.

The only problem with pluses in they are inevitably followed by minuses, and the Thermaltake DuOrb does have it’s share. Though the thermal testing does show promise with quad core processors, the performance delta isn’t wide enough to avoid being swallowed up by the extra heat generated during overclocking. The size of the cooler is both it’s greatest asset and weakness, as it can make for some dubious installation situations. You’d best be aware of which way your fan mounts are arranged, lest you wind up mounting this cooler vertically and blocking a couple expansion slots. Then we come to the price, which for the performance numbers posted is a little high. That price does go into the extra material required to make this heatsink, but it does force one to make a choice.

In the end, it’s still hard to avoid recommending the Thermaltake DuOrb on the basis that it’s a quiet cooler with decent performance numbers. It’s no slouch in the aesthetics department, and will keep many of your sub-systems cool. Is it a good cooler for overclockers? Probably not, unless you are feeling just a bit naughty and want to squeeze only a few extra MHz out of your CPU. The price is a sticking point, but if you want a unique and quiet cooler for your stock quad core system I would suggest taking a strong look at the Thermaltake DuOrb CPU cooler.

The Good

  • Decent performance
  • Quiet
  • Manages to cool CPU and chipset
  • Unique design

The Bad

  • Cooling for overclocking not as decent
  • Size of cooler might be a hindrance
  • Price a little steep

Overall Rating: 8.5/10.0

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