I think that is the Thermaltake Orb, or at least it looks extremely similar.

thanks
needed to jog my memory.
Thermaltake copied the design from HP if I am not mistaken...?

I have a gold colored P-III heatsink like that, from thermaltake.
It looks fancy, but one cannot buy a replacement fan for it, so it is not practical at all.

stano wrote:

thanks
needed to jog my memory.
Thermaltake copied the design from HP if I am not mistaken...?

I don't know, but the last time I've seen one of those it was in a HP rp2410 (a PA-RISC computer).

Yes, i think HP used coolers that looked similar in their Alpha based computers. Seems like I can´t find a site that had some info about the Orb and their similarities to HP coolers...

Dig through Frostytech's ancient reviews. Everything ever interesting is in there. 😉

Also, overclockers.com covered interesting heatsinks back in the late '90s/early '00s.

Dans Datas massive cooler comparison page has eight of the Thermaltake Orbs.

Once I was given a Thermaltake Dragon Orb 3 with the 7000 RPM fan. For the weight, looks and noise of the thing I expected it to perform much better than a standard aluminium heatsink, but it really didn't.

gerwin wrote:

I have a gold colored P-III heatsink like that, from thermaltake.
It looks fancy, but one cannot buy a replacement fan for it, so it is not practical at all.

The Golden Orb was extremely popular. I kinda miss mine.

The product installation seemed crazy though. You attached it to the motherboard, then with a twisting motion, tighten it down instead of the normal pushing down on the clip. Makes you wonder if it's really good to do that to a CPU with the core exposed, just grinding Arctic Silver into it's surface in a circular motion while the force increases. Swore I heard those little microscopic beads crunching while I twisted towards the end.

Spire made coolers that look rather similar also. I got 2 different Spire coolers, one all aluminium, and one with a copper base that's significantly heavier.

they made an upgraded version with a copper base:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Thermaltake-Copper-Intel- … =item588448c82f

I used a pair on my dual tualatin setup. kept 1.4ghz processors ice cold.

Nice heatsinks! I can "feel" how good they are! Nice, simple and minimalistic, yet, very effective design.

word of warning though. They are not designed for chips with heatspreaders. I had to modify mine to get it to work on a tualatin. I have a picture of the modification you need to do if anyone cares.

I have coolers that look almost identical to these, made by Spire. These coolers have a couple disadvantages compared to the standard square-shaped coolers:
*They are harder to install/uninstall. Also I prefer to use coolers that have mounting clips with 3 attachment points per side. These coolers have 1 end with 3 and 1 end with just 1 mounting hole.
*If the fan is toast? Good luck trying to find a replacement fan that will fit (btw, the fan is removable).
*The Spire coolers I used I didn't find particularly silent.
*For some reason I found them more difficult to mount with lots of caps and other stuff near the socket.
Relatively speaking, when space around the socket is limited, the maximum square coolers you can mount are beefier compared to these circular coolers.
*I didn't find the aluminium Spire coolers to be particularly good at cooling. I like the standard AMD copper based heatsinks a lot more.

But apart from that I got my Spire coolers for like €2 each so meh 😜
And they do look nice 😁