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Road to the Pentium 4: Thermaltake Indigo Orb
By Kelly Lu - August 4, 2001
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Now, here at OnePC, we have never really taken a look at specific heatsinks for your processor because our target audience is not those who take the opportunity to overclock their processors the moment they buy their hardware--of course, we don't discourage these people either. Since I'm doing a series of reviews on products required for setting up or upgrading to a Pentium 4 system, I thought that it was only appropriate to introduce you to one of the top Pentium 4 coolers on the market, the Indigo Orb from Thermaltake, provided by one of our affiliates, HighSpeed PC. Plus, I'm sure that there are many users out there who prefer to save a bunch and purchase OEM versions of the Pentium 4, which usually don't come with a stock heatsink, so an alternative heatsink such as the Indigo Orb becomes a necessity.
If you haven't read any of the other parts of this series, I suggest you do so as this "Road to the Pentium 4" series is intended to introduce you to products that are required by Pentium 4 processors that you might not know of before. I also suggest you read part 1 of this series to find out the details of what it's about.
Thermaltake is the company responsible for introducing one of the coolest-looking and equally high-performing cooling products around, their Golden Orb. They are also responsible for the Chrome Orb, which are being used by many owners of Athlon or Duron systems. The Indigo Orb that we're looking at today is very much similar, in terms of looks, to its other siblings, but, instead of being designed for a Socket 370 or Socket A processor, it is designed for a Socket 423 processor--the Pentium 4, to be specific.
Before I continue, I'd like to point out that this review of the Thermaltake Indigo Orb is intended only to introduce an alternative cooling solution for an OEM Pentium 4 processor, and not to show how well the product will handle overclocking situations! So, if you're looking for temperature readings accurate to the 4th decimal place with the processor running at 15X its rated speed, this review won't do it!
First Impressions
 Upon first look, the Indigo Orb has an almost identical design to the other "orbs," with the same twirling-fin design, except for two differences. The first being the difference in color--the Indigo Orb, with its blue'ish color, is the most attractive heatsink that I've seen ever. The second difference lies in the fact that the actual heatsink is attached to a rectangular plate, which is intended to allow the cooler to be attached to the Pentium 4's new heatsink retention mechanism. Two parallel slits along the length of the plate are made to accommodate the clips for this retention mechanism, but are the cause of the biggest problem with this heatsink-explained later.
The heatsink boasts a huge fan that goes at 5500RPM, which is, relatively to the stock heatsinks that I've worked with before (I'm not an expert overclocker... sorry!), very high and pushes about 36CFM (cubic feet per minute), which is, again, relatively very high. I've seen other fans go at higher RPM rates just to push a lower CFM rate, but the Indigo Orb has a very high RPM to CFM ratio care of its larger fins on the fan.
As far as weight, the Indigo Orb is certainly one of the heavier aluminum heatsinks around, but that shouldn't be a problem for the new retention mechanism that the Pentium 4 calls for. Of course, it is still a lot lighter than the all--copper heatsinks that I've held before.
 On to: Installation
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