Thermaltake DuOrb CPU Cooler

A CPU cooler for when your computer doesn’t have enough red or blue light.

You’re walking down a darkened alley when suddenly you spot a telltale sign through someone’s case window – red and blue lights that tell you it’s time to get out of there. Thankfully, this cooler doesn’t want to arrest you for your wrongdoings (as unlikely as they are), but rather wants to sit on top of a heat source and radiate it into the surrounding air.

The first step of that process is a copper/aluminium base, into which six heatpipes are inserted. Three of these are bent upwards, and then curved around to form a mostly complete circle. The other three complete the other side of the cooler. Wrapped around these pipes are an outer array of copper fins, and an internal array of aluminium (presumably to cut down on cost).

An 80mm fan is nestled in the center of each circle, sucking in air and blowing it through the surrounding fins. It’s also a very good pen launcher, though don’t tell anyone that we told you. Each fan is also screwed in, so if one dies it should be relatively simple to source a replacement.

At stock speeds this cooler performs quite well (and looks rather dashing at the same time), but when we put it under the torture test of an overclocked and overvolted Quad in OCCT load, it crashed when the temperature reached 80 degrees.

This is partly due to the poor flatness of the base, as its concavity caused such a bad CPU contact the first time we mounted it that temperatures briefly reached 95 degrees! We added more than the usual thin layer of thermal paste and things worked much better. Keep in mind that if you’re going to use this cooler, particularly large sticks of RAM simply won’t fit underneath it. You do get the added benefit of chipset and motherboard cooling, however, both of which were appreciably cooler.

We recommend this cooler if you’re into something a little out of the ordinary, or simply want something cool to show off in your case.