Thermaltake are pretty well known around the world for their unconventional coolers. Unfortunately unconventional doesn't necessary mean efficient. Thermaltake flagship Dragon ORB 3 comes in two favors: the quiet model with a 4900rpm fan and the performance model with a 7000rpm fan. We had the chance to test the second model. It comes in a nice plastic box along with several installation instructions printed on the box and with a fan header to ATX adapter. As you can see from the left picture the cooler looks cool, but let's take a closer look.

We unscrewed the top red-brick heatsink which holds the fan. We discovered that this doesn't have an active role in the cooling process, it's more a fashion add-on. The inferior heatsink is composed of two parts: a round cooper base and a blue aluminum coat. The base continues deep into the cooler with several short fins. Unfortunately these fins are not enough to assure the proper dissipation surface. So we were not very impressed about the heatsink design.

Dragon ORB uses a Everflow T126025BU fan, able to move 38CFM. Although it's rated at 37dB(A) we measured a noise of 61dB(A) in real world tests. The most common spin was around 7050rpm.

The clip is good, can be installed both with the screwdriver and by hand. The cooler comes from factory equipped with Berquist 225U thermal interface, but with no additional thermal compound. In our performance tests we wiped the shipped interface and added Artic Silver.

The cooler performance is not special. It succeeded to bring the CPU temperature at a maximum temperature of 45C, but combined with the noise it provides I don't think that Dragon ORB is a very good idea. It looks cool, but the performance is better with other old fashion coolers.

The cooler weight is quite big, but the three holes clip is able to firmly attach the cooler to the socket. Dragon ORB 3 is recommend to work with AMD 1.5Ghz and beyond and Pentium III up to 2.0Ghz. We do not recommend overclocking at this frequency because it's surely not possible.

Test results: