Installation of the Indigo Orb was, well... I hated it! The Indigo Orb and was designed to be installed with Intel's reference heatsink retention mechanism design that many of the earliest Pentium 4 motherboards utilized, so it came with the necessary clips needed for that type of an installation--and I'm sure it would have been virtually painless to install onto a motherboard with an Intel reference design retention mechanism. Now, however, many of the newer motherboards, including my DFI WT70, which I will review later on for this series and the Abit TH7, use a newer-type heatsink mechanism that is a lot different from Intel's design--even boards that originally used Intel's design, such as the Asus P4T, are switching to this newer clip design, I heard.

Put simply, the Indigo Orb is literally a chore to install onto one of these newer-type heatsink retention mechanisms. When I tried to install the heatsink, the clips that swung down and that were designed to clip in and hold down the heatsink were too wide to fit into the above-mentioned slits. Observe the picture below where it shows what I'm (trying) to explain (left: before shot--the clip doesn't fit; right: after--ah, finally, it fits):

In order to get the clips to fit into the slits, I had to widen the slits so that they would be wide enough for the clips by grinding through the aluminum--that took a whole 2 days and a very sore arm to do (I didn't have any power tools thin enough to do the job). It was only after all that work was done to the Indigo Orb that I could manage to get the clips to fit into the slits and, finally, get it installed.

I'm never going to do that again, no matter how fantastic the Indigo Orb looks after all the hard manual labour...

Powering Up
After all that effort in installing the Indigo Orb on any of my Pentium 4 motherboards, I was surprised to see the Indigo Orb do an excellent job in the performance department-a relief, actually, since I would have literally cut it apart with a power saw if it didn't work well. The fan does a great job of pushing a LOT of air through--I'm sure the fan on the Indigo Orb will make a great desk fan on a hot day.

Needless to say, the Indigo Orb does a great job of cooling my Pentium 4 1.7GHz. Unfortunately, I don't have quantitative numbers for you now, but I'll be sure to include some in the final part of this Road to the Pentium 4 series (still recovering from all the sawing).

As far as sound goes, I wasn't exactly impressed by the Indigo Orb, but I was not dissatisfied either. It was louder than all of my stock heatsinks that I had lying around, but only by a little bit, which is acceptable. No complaints here...

On to: Conclusion