-- ThermalTake
Dragon Orb 3 (A1135) Socket Cooler
-- Price: ~ $35.00
USD
-- 7.10.2001
-- By: GideonX
-- Page: 1 2
3
Having been established back in 1998, ThermalTake
has created quite a stir with their coolers. Our first contact
with their product was the famed Golden Orb a year or so back.
This tiny round cooler was original in design and affordable.
It provided the much needed spark for cooling industry.
Since then, numerous other orbs and coolers have
been developed and released with praise from the hardware community.
Recently, they have released their newest cooler, the Dragon Orb 3.
The orb design is different in that it uses a fan within a
cylindrical heatsink. This new design for the Dragon Orb
situates the fan above the circle, instead of within it. Gone
also is the slower speed fan, it is replaced by a monstrous 7000rpm
fan!
The packaging has also changed, what
used to be sent in a blank white box, is now encased in a shiny
plastic package. Don't worry, it's real easy to open, nothing
is glued shut. There are two versions of this unit, the one we
tested (A1135), uses the 7000rpm fan, while the A1132 uses a 4900rpm
fan.
The unit supports:
Some specs on this cooler direct from
TT:
|
SPECIFICATION
|
|
P/N
|
A1135
|
|
Fan
Dimension
|
60x60x25
mm |
|
Rated
Voltage
|
12VDC |
|
Started
Voltage
|
7VDC |
|
Power
Input
|
6.0W |
|
FAN
Speed
|
7000±10%
RPM |
|
Max.
Air Flow
|
38CFM |
|
Noise
|
37dBA |
|
Current
|
0.5AMP |
|
Interface
Material
|
Bergquist
225U |
|
Dimensions
|
69
dia mm x 79 mm tall |
|
Bearing
System
|
Ball
Bearing |
|
Life
Time
|
50,000
hours |
|
Connector
|
3
PIN |
As you can notice, this unit is a lot
taller than the others we have seen. The connector type is
labeled as 3-pin, but it comes with a 3pin -> 4pin Molex adapter.
Most likely used to prevent any burn outs from using the fan headers
on motherboards that can not support the high powered fan.
Also included in the package is the
cooler itself and a large piece of thermal interface material.
There are some easy to follow instructions on the back of the
packaging. Nothing too complicated, everyone can install this
thing if you follow those 3 steps.
One of the immediate sections of this
unit that I noticed is the newly styled fan clip. From our
previous experiences, most clips on coolers are killers for people
with delicate fingertips. This unit comes with a very large
clip which instead of covering just one motherboard clip, it covers
all three. Notice the small notch right above the middle hole,
ThermalTake went ahead and created something useful to get some
leverage on the clip when using a small flat headed screwdriver.
Here is the bottom of the base,
complete with a black thermal pad. Anyway, we scraped that off
like always and prepared it for the Arctic Silver thermal grease.
That circle in the middle of the base is all copper, a good material
to transfer heat away from the cpu core.
The fan is attached by a screw in 3
locations, removable by any Philips screwdriver. Please be sure
not to press too hard on the aluminum surrounding the fan, it is
very soft and easily bent. In the second picture, you can see
the different design of the middle copper core. Instead of a
flat surface, numerous smaller fins protrude from the core.
This creates a lot more surface area to dissipate heat. I
personally would have thought having taller fins would have made a
better cooler out of this, but ThermalTake are the engineers here,
not me : )
|
