Thermaltake Blue Orb II

Installation

Installation is extremely easy and can be done in a few minutes, if you don't run into the space problem, as we did below. The easy understandable english manual covers installation for Socket 775 and two installation methods for Socket 939. On the Thermaltake Website you can also find a nice Flash animation which shows the installation process. Since the installation process is identical to that of the Golden Orb II, this time, we will show the installation on the Socket 775 ABIT AL8.


The Blue Orb II does not fit, because ABIT's chipset heatsink is blocking it. As Thermaltake support told us this can be easily fixed by rotating the chipset heatsink 180°.


We remove the plastic pins which hold the ABIT heatsink by pushing them together and through the hole.


Now the heatsink comes off easily. As you can see the thermal pad on the core is intact - we reviewed this board here and took it through quite some overclocking. Just rotate the heatsink, put it back on, put the clips through the mounting holes.. done.


Now the cooler fits without problems and we can finish the installation by screwing down the cooler.



On the DFI LanParty NF4 the big cooler blocks access to two memory slots.



With the cooler installed, it is no longer possible to add or remove memory in slots 3 and 4. Make sure to install the memory before putting on the cooler. I tried fitting a few memory modules, and even with a heatspreader, there should be enough space left to install the cooler.



In order to make sure that mounting pressure on the CPU is not exceeded, Thermaltake has added limiters to the screws. You just screw it down till it stops, the springs help distribute the load on the CPU evenly.