| Thermalright HR-01 Heatpipe | |||
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Product: Thermalright HR-01 Heatpipe with Optional Fan Duct Thermalright has an excellent track record of air cooling products. Beginning with the SLK-948 and 947U for AMD Socket A and Intel Socket 478, made out of solid copper, they established a large fan base in the enthusiast market, competing against the high quality Zalman CNPS series, as well as Thermaltake’s popular Volcano heat sinks. Now they have broken into the silent PC market with the HighRise-01 (HR-01). Today we’ll be comparing this passive heat sink to AMD’s stock cooling solution.
Features
Technical Specifications
What’s in the box
As you can see, the construction quality is excellent. The base consists of a brushed nickel plated surface smoothed down to an excellent finish for optimum heat transfer. Eight heat pipes transfer heat from the base to the 31 soldered fins, again increasing heat transfer efficiency. A duct attaches to one side with sticky tape and molded tabs on the duct itself to any 120mm fan with proper mounting holes.
Installation The HR-01 attaches to a standard K8 mounting piece, much like the stock cooler, and installation is very simple. Just clip in the back and front brackets to the tabs on the mounting piece, and lock it in over the indentation milled into the base
Installing the fan duct took a little more work. Although the duct is flexible, it’s still fairly stiff, and for this particular motherboard and case combination, it had to flex downwards a fair amount. This created a few attachment problems, as you can see here.
However, after messing around a bit and some uncomfortable twisting and flexing, I managed to fully attach the duct to both the heat sink and fan.
Testing The test was carried out on the following system: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939 (Venice) @1.8ghz 1.35v Idle temperatures were recorded after a fresh restart after one hour idling in Windows XP Professional empty desktop. Load temperatures were recorded after one hour of 100% CPU load using Prime95 with in-place FFTs for maximum heat output. Stock cooler at 100% fan speed: 29C idle, 44C load Well! Not too shabby for a passive cooler. The one performance related note I noticed was that the cooler tended to be slow coming down from load temperatures. It usually took nearly a full minute for it to come from 36C to 28C. Though this could probably be solved by a more powerful fan, the one used for this test was rated only at 69 CFM @ 2400RPM, and there is a large surface area to remove excess heat from. The only negative part about this heat sink is its rather stringent mounting requirements. Though Thermalright’s website claims it fits any K8, 478, or LGA775 motherboard, it does not say anything about case restrictions and fan placement. Though the duct was very flexible, it puts unnecessary twist on the heat sink, and reduces clearance between it and the video card on this motherboard. So when considering this heat sink, check your motherboard layout in comparison to your case (and make sure you have a 120mm exhaust fan!)
Conclusion In all, I give this product a 4.5 out of 5, for excellent silent cooling performance, its only drawback being its finicky layout requirements.
Pros: + Excellent cooling performance Cons: - Case/motherboard layout requirements |
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