Every Ge Force2 video card out there will overclock to a certain extent, to gauge the value of the Blue Orb, I compared the maximum overclocked speed that that the factory unit was able to provide (215Mhz /360Mhz) versus the maximum overclocked speed that the Blue Orb was able to achieve (230Mhz / 360Mhz).

I only used one benchmark, Quake III using my .cfg which basically has Medium Geometry settings, maximum details, vertex lighting, 32bit colours, and the resolution was set to 800x600 and 1024x768. I use these settings for visual clarity (ie the Blue team is more visible in RA3) as well as a constant 120FPS.

Quake III Time Demo 1:

215Mhz / 360Mhz @ 800x600 = 179 FPS, @ 1024x768 = 138 FPS

230Mhz/ 360Mhz @ 800x600 = 181 FPS, @ 1024x768 = 140 FPS

Conclusions:

The benchmark results say that the Blue Orb is NOT worth it. However, the price is very attractive, and some people may like to have the extra cooling that the Blue Orb does provide in spades.

Besides, how can you have an ultra pimp system without the coolest looking coolers in it? This Blue Orb is incredibly cool looking, and is one of few Orbs that are not all hype, this one is a great performer too! Unfortunately, it's intended to cool the portion of the video card that does not directly contribute to higher frame rates.

Now if there was just a way to have a big, and thin heatsink to cover all of the video ram chips at once... that would be truly impressive.

I must commend Thermaltake on their Blue Orb, it DOES cool down the Ge Force2 GPU quite well, unfortunately the GPU's clock speed above 200Mhz doesn't have any practical use, when the real bottleneck is the video ram. In the end, the Blue Orb is a great product, with a good price, unfortunately it doesn't contribute to a direct FPS increase. So as a cooling product, it gets high points, but as a performance enhancing product (FPS) it unfortunately doesn't serve any real purpose.