Thermaltake Blue Orb Video Card Cooler

Installation of the Blue Orb is pretty straight forward. The hardest part is removing the factory cooler used in your video card. Lucky for me my Creative GTS Ultra uses push pins for the factory cooler, making removal pretty painless; so I thought. I discovered that my factory cooler is not only held in place by push pins but heatsink glue as well. I had to use a knife to scrape off the glue that was still stuck on the Geforce GPU.

Once the factory cooler was removed I decided to lap the GPU core for a little better performance. The Creative GTS Ultra use the same push pins to mount its cooler as the Blue Orb use. The pin goes into the two holes circled in red. Since I will be using the push pin, there is no need for the thermal tape so I applied the supplied heatsink grease. This will give you higher performance than the thermal tape.

This is how the finished installation of the Blue Orb looks. The only thing I don't like about it is the blue color clashes with the green color of the Creative GTS Ultra. The Blue Orb would look wicked on a 3D Prophet, which matches much better with the color scheme.