HR-05

Click to enlarge

The HR-05 is packaged in a brightly coloured box with shiny foil lettering and hologram specs written on the back. At least that’s how you’d expect it to arrive; instead you’ll find a simply brown box with blue lettering letting you know the manufacturer, the product name and no more.

Click to enlarge

Inside it doesn’t get any more interesting, with only the product itself and no advertising spiel. You also get four cable-ties which are used for mounting a fan on the cooler, a couple of instruction sheets, mounting clips, a foam shroud, a syringe of heatpaste and the heatsink itself. While the no-nonsense approach makes sense, once you’ve bought a product there is no need to advertise it and it costs less to produce, but Thermalright products are hardly budget items.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The base and the heatpipe are made of copper and plated with nickel to protect the copper from oxidising and to match the aluminium fins. The heatpipe is the usual U-shaped affair with the apex meeting the base and held in place by two sandwiched blocks of copper. There are no obvious solder marks which is a testament to the build quality and QC that Thermalright command.

Click to enlarge

The fins stack on top of the heatpipe and are either wedged into place, or stealth soldered into position. Looking at the fins from the side, it appears that they make a grid rather than a grill as each fin as small bent-up projections. This increases the air turbulence, which for a passive product is ideal as it’s not likely to be actively cooled. Should you decide that passive isn’t good enough, the provided cable-ties allow you to mount a non-standard 70mm fan. Using cable-ties seems to be a bit of a cop-out by Thermalright and I would have liked to have seen standard clips as with other TR products.

Click to enlarge

The heatpipes extend further than you’d expect out of the top of the cooler by a good centimetre or so. There doesn’t appear to be any reasoning behind doing so (no discernable additional cooling) and it looks a little odd. It won’t hinder anything although it raises the height of the HR-05.

Click to enlarge

In order to provide a large degree of compatibility, the HR-05 comes with an array of different mounting clips. They all attach to the cooler in the same manner; there is a small indentation on the top, and in the middle of the copper base which the clips sit in with there central bulge. This allows you to rotate the clip you choose at any angle, or indeed the heatsink meaning you can avoid any surface components.

Click to enlarge

You get a single hook-style clips which is used for motherboards that have hooks instead of holes by the chipset. The rest of the clips rely on the spring loaded push-pins which go through the holes on the varying length brackets and then into your motherboard. As most stock heatsink are mounted in this way, there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues providing your motherboard is constructed to spec. Due to these brackets, the cooler commands a pretty extensive array of compatibility available to read over on their site here. As usual, this won’t be a complete list but rather the boards that are confirmed to be compatible.

While the number of theoretically compatible chipsets seems large, the actual number of motherboards that can effectively use this cooler is much smaller. Since chipsets have recently been reaching temperature levels that a simple aluminium heatsink can’t deal with, motherboard manufacturers have started to make bespoke copper trails of node heatsinks and linking heatpipes. These coolers service multiple heat-producing locations on the same board, including the southbridge, chipset and PWM; removing the cooler leaves those locations naked. While the southbridge can be easily accommodated with a small heatsink and some epoxy paste, the PWM area does not have to conform to any standard meaning after-market PWM coolers are difficult to support. Hence, removal of a large stock heatsink set will leave your PWM area naked and even if you’re chipset is running at Arctic temperatures, your board is going to die quicker while the PWM caps heat up from the additional over-volting from overclocking.

Thermalright do offer a PWM cooler although the supported motherboard list isn’t as large as hoped for. Plus you’d have to purchase another product in order to fully use the HR-05 with some boards.

As a result, only motherboards that use individual heatsinks can benefit from the HR-05, which normally means boards which don’t produce much heat (there is a reason why the manufacture didn’t use a large heatsink) and so won’t need additional cooling. Also, any true enthusiast board will use a node heatsink set eliminating the high-end overclocking boards from using the cooler where it would be best suited.