Thermaltake Orchestra

[D_o_S]

Passive cooling without fans is the holy grail of cooling because it does not add annoying fan noise to your system. While this is almost impossible using air cooling, Thermaltake has engineered an external watercooling solution that can keep a modern CPU cool without any fans. Thermaltake's Orchestra is very easy to install, even for novices, and comes with everything included to get you up and running.

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[newtekie1]

Booo Aluminum.

Also your temp table is screwed up.

You put:

Alphacool 2502MHz, 1.55V 20°C 26°C

I think you meant:

Alphacool 2502MHz, 1.55V 30°C 26°C

As that both makes more sense, and it matches what your graphs show.

 

[lemonadesoda]

What a silly name. Marketing department should be fired.

"Orchestra" sounds like this thing is going to be very noisy!

"Orchestra" is what you might call a sound card, or a CD of samples. But a cooler? Idiotic.

 

[W1zzard]

Booo Aluminum.

Also your temp table is screwed up.

You put:

Alphacool 2502MHz, 1.55V 20°C 26°C

I think you meant:

Alphacool 2502MHz, 1.55V 30°C 26°C

As that both makes more sense, and it matches what your graphs show.

fixed. thank you.

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

do we have a street price on this thing, compared to alphacool, or the other 0 db unit?

nice review, and this thing is pretty interesting

 

[Gorre]

"Also, I have yet to calibrate the temperature sensor on my DFI NF4 Expert, which is notoriously known for reporting lower-than-actual temperatures. In the worst case scenario, we can say that the Expert was reporting temperatures 10 C lower than actual, which would mean that at the end of our 2 hour test, the core of the CPU was sizzling away at 60 C."

Maybe I'm just dim, or was that meant to be 50C? Since the highest temp I can see is 39C.

Like I said, maybe I'm just dim :x

 

[W1zzard]

looks like it's supposed to mean 49°c .. i'll ask the original author to check it

 

[Mussels]

Looks like a nice cooler from TT, and i generally hate all TT products.

It's a pity about the corrosion, how long do you think it would take for that level of corrosion to impact performance?

Oh and for temp testing on the NF4 system, use a program called CoreTemp, it reads direct from the CPU die and gives the true temperatures (It works on all A64 chips, and sempron64 too) (And yes, it is quite often 10C up on what the mobo reports)

 

[W1zzard]

It's a pity about the corrosion, how long do you think it would take for that level of corrosion to impact performance?

educated guess: several years

 

[pt]

looks nice, but zalman has better offers

 

[t_ski]

When I first saw this I thought it was fan-cooled, just like a mini Symphony (BTW, that's where the name comes from - it's in comparison to the larger unit). With the size of the rad/res I figured for sure they had a couple fans in there.

Being hard core, I don't believe in silent cooling.

 

[D_o_S]

"Also, I have yet to calibrate the temperature sensor on my DFI NF4 Expert, which is notoriously known for reporting lower-than-actual temperatures. In the worst case scenario, we can say that the Expert was reporting temperatures 10 C lower than actual, which would mean that at the end of our 2 hour test, the core of the CPU was sizzling away at 60 C."

Maybe I'm just dim, or was that meant to be 50C? Since the highest temp I can see is 39C.

Like I said, maybe I'm just dim :x

Hi,

I was referring to the temperature reported by Everest... if you open up the Fluke View Forms picture, and read the note at the bottom, it says that "Everest showed 51 C at the end of the run". Just to allow for the worst case scenario, I added 10 C (ok, fine, I rounded off a bit... but this is just guesstimating, don't forget) to the reported value.

Looks like a nice cooler from TT, and i generally hate all TT products.

It's a pity about the corrosion, how long do you think it would take for that level of corrosion to impact performance?

Oh and for temp testing on the NF4 system, use a program called CoreTemp, it reads direct from the CPU die and gives the true temperatures (It works on all A64 chips, and sempron64 too) (And yes, it is quite often 10C up on what the mobo reports)

I have tried core temp, and I have found it to be the same as what Everest was showing on my mobo.

 

[cormi]

Hi, I'm a newbie in WC and I'm considering to build a high end PC myself. I have a lot of experience with building AC PC's. Since I'm getting tired of the noise of the AirCooled system I have to switch over to WaterCooling. The configuration I'm thinking of is: ASUS MB (type yet to be determined), Intel core 2 duo processor E6600, 2 VGA cards in SLI mode, 500 GB hard drive. Is there anyone who could help me answering these questions:
1) the review of the Thermaltake orchestra looks appealing to me. Is the cooling capacity of the Orchestra sufficient for cooling both the CPU and 2 GPU's? PC is used for office purposes, gaming and multimedia (video).
2) Can anyone advise a PSU for this configuration? As silent as possible!!. I would like to build the configuration in a Silverstone desktop.

Any other advise to support my plans are welcome!! Thanks!!

Cormi.

 

[Chewy]

I cant answer your question but I think you should get a asus 680i board

I take it whe you say sli you are going to get some higher end maybe dx10 cards? I hear they run kinda hot and if you were to get a intel quad core x9700, I hear that it runs really hot so for high overclocking you would need some very good cooling.

Sorry I coulden't answer your question.

 

[newtekie1]

Well I suggest you avoid this in all honesty, I just can't stand corrosion, even if it won't really affect anything for years. It is silent, but the no fans, just like other fanless solutions, makes it cool worse than some air cooling.

Personally if you want silence get a case that has 120mm fans in it, and something like a Zalman9700, which is virtually silent when run on low or medium. Add a power supply like the Hiper Type-R(I know Hiper is a pain to deal with, but I still just can't find a power supply that is that silent, yet modular and actually a good power supply). You don't need to go watercooling to get silent running. In fact that is a mistake a lot of people make, watercooling usually doesn't mean silence. Usually you are taking the 1 large fan on the processor and replacing it with 2 large fans on the radiator. If you then take the GPU fans off and run everything through the radiator, you can expect those 2 fans to run at full speed and be pretty loud if you want them to keep everything cool.