Test procedure

I decided to test the orange orb against the older blue orb as well as the passive cooling that came stock on my MSI Geforce 2 MX card. To test the cooling abilities of the heatsinks, I ran each setup through 2 tests twice. Once at standard (175/166) core and memory settings, and again at the highest stable clock settings I had been able to achieve with the passive cooling setup, 215(core)/194(mem).

To test the average 'idle' temperature of the card, I left my system sitting at desktop with explorer open for 1 hour (monitor shutdown and screen saver disabled). To test the temperature of the card during actual gaming, I ran 3dmark 2001 through 10 loops of the first three game tests, approximately 30 minutes long, and recorded the highest temperature reached. All temperatures were recorded with a thermistor taped to the back of the card over the core.

Heatsink	Idle(175/166)	Load (175/166)	Idle (215/194)	Load (215/194)
Passive Heatsink	42 C	46 C	45 C	49 C
Orange Orb	40 C	43 C	42 C	45 C
Blue Orb	40 C	44 C	43 C	46 C

Hmm... I guess I was hoping for a little bit more of a temperature differential between the various setups. Then again, the two orbs certainly make a noticeable difference over the passive sink. If this was my CPU cooling setup, I'd be pretty pleased with a 4C drop...

The Orange orb is the overall winner, pulling ahead of the Blue orb by a degree in 3 of the four tests. It was also (unsurprisingly) able to reach the highest stable core clock I have managed to get out of this card, 228Mhz. The Blue orb fell off after 224, and the stock heatsink could only do 215 stable as I had mentioned. For this review, I am defining 'stable' as finishing the load benchmark (10 loops of each of the first 6 tests) successfully with no visible artifacts. My 3dmark scores I am not going to publicize, to avoid being mocked by Colin, but if you are curious, let me know. :)

I was a little surprised with the results from the Blue orb, I was honestly expecting it to be a more efficient heatsink than the Orange Orb, but I guess that the full contact base and one piece design are more important than sheer surface area and fan speed... I even cleaned off the thermal paste and re-applied just in case I'd put too much on when I attached the Blorb, but same results. I'd like to do this again with an Asus card with built in temperature measurement sometime soon.

Overall, I can recommend the Orange orb to anyone who is currently using a passive heatsink on their video card (provided you make sure the clips stay clear of the fan). For replacing stock active heatsinks on newer cards like the Geforce3, I have my doubts that it is going to make much of a difference. I will test this as soon as I get the chance, but please let me know if you have already tried it. If you already have a Blue orb and you really want to use your first PCI slot, consider this BGA heatsink a must buy.