Do you still remember the first generation Golden Orb? It looked really cool, something different from conventional coolers. Using the same principle as the infamous giant 'Panaflo Orb', it consisted of a circular heat sink with a fan inside blowing air past the radial fins. Because Intel processors were relatively cool, using such low airflow fans and tiny heat sinks were more than enough to keep the processors under 50^oC.

But after the AMD launched their thunder-stealing Thunderbird processor, the Golden Orb lost its ground pretty fast because of issues like its reputation as a 'core cruncher' and  not being able to properly cool the processor which had a high thermal load. Since then, Thermaltake has released many versions of the Orb, like the first 'AMD friendly' Chrome Orb, the twin fans-powered Super Orb, the heavy beast Mini Copper Orb, etc.

However, even with refinements, they were still not good enough to cool AMD processors of speeds of 1GHz and above. And now, with the release of their evolutionary Dragon Orb, does Thermaltake now have a cooler to compete against the kings of the coolers - the Thermalright SK-6 and the Globalwin WBK38?

Earlier on, I sent them an e-mail, hoping to get a sample from them, without knowing that they were about to release the Dragon Orb. A few days later, I received a 1MB e-mail from them! I was quite annoyed because I hate receiving e-mails with large attachments. :D

When I saw the picture attached to the e-mail, I was rather disappointed. Another cooler from the Orb series again? Super Orb was the top model of the Orb series and yet, its cooling performance was too poor to even cool my Pentium 3 processor!

But according to the specs of the new cooler, they are now using Everflow's 7000 rpm fan and a copper base design, similar to the Mini Copper Orb. I was still a little skeptical about its performance but I was also intrigued. So I asked for a sample of the new Dragon Orb. I waited for about a month after that but a package from Thermaltake finally arrived!