HR-05 IFX

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For those wondering, IFX stands for Infernal Fire eXtinguisher and is an obvious marketing name. The box that the product is sent in is the usual boring brown box, with Thermalright stamped on the top and the product name on the size. While it may not look the mutts nuts, it does mean that you pay less as there is less marketing garb to finance.

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Inside the box, you’ll find the cooler itself, and all of the mounting screws, bolts and grommets, along with a couple of 80mm fan clips. The fan brackets are the usual wire type, and hug the cooler and your selected fan keeping it connected with the heatsink itself. This is a definite upgrade from the original HR-05 which would only support a 70mm fan rather than the more widely-spread 80mm standard, and had cable-ties to attach the fan to fins.

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The IFX itself is modelled similar to the IFX-14 heatsink, with the flame shaped fins. While these look a lot more interesting than the plain rounded rectangle type, they are prime candidates for hooking a wire while you are doing your cable management. These flame projections are unlikely to dramatically improve the surface area of the cooler, and are merely there for aesthetic improvement which can’t be a bad thing.

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The actual design of the cooler isn’t too dissimilar to the original HR-05 with the single U-shaped heatsink meeting the base of the cooler at the apex of the bend. The whole thing is dressed in silver, with the copper base and the heatpipe covered with a thin plating of nickel to prevent corrosion and to make the whole thing the same colour. The fins are all pressed aluminium, with the same grid style design provided by tab pressed out of each fin perpendicular to the fins orientation. This will hopefully raise air turbulence and hence allow heat an easier path into the air.

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The fins and the heatpipe are all soldered into place, but it’s difficult to see where this has occurred. Just like the original HR-05, this product has been manufactured to the same high-level; with quality control being meticulously carried out. While the HR-05 was a passive product with the option to include a fan at a later date, the IFX version is designed to run with an 80mm fan. Of course it can be run passively, but the market that this product is aimed at those that demand Arctic silicon temperatures in lieu of silent computing.

You get the two different ways of mounting a chipset ‘sink; hooks or screws. The hook method is seen less and less on new motherboards, as using push-pins are much easier to attach at the factory. This time, the IFX mounts with screws rather than a couple of spring loaded push-pins as with the original. This is apparently meant to increase the compatibility, but the design of the bracket is more likely to do this as it now has a long rectangular hole where a screw can fit, meaning that only two brackets are needed; one for the hooks, and one for the screws.

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Whichever bracket you choose, they both have a small projection which matches the dent drilled into the middle of the top side of the interface pad on the heatsink itself. This means that you’ll be able to rotate the cooler to a certain degree which will hopefully reduce the chance of a surface component conflict.

Thermalright have obviously designed this product to fit as many motherboards as possible but there in lies the problem with third-party chipset coolers. Have a look on any online motherboard shop, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a motherboard that doesn’t have an all-in-one cooling system that covers the PWM, northbridge and southbridge chips. While Thermalright do have a PWM cooler that you can purchase, it seems a little unfair to have a chipset cooler that requires you to purchase another product for it to be at least on par with the stock cooling. Looking at some performance motherboards, such as the MSI x38 Diamond, the manufacturers are now including custom designed coolers like the Curcu-pipe cooler seen on that board.

Thermalright therefore are making stand against motherboard manufactures, by challenging their efforts to make mobo’s cooler. Thermalright are at an obvious disadvantage, as motherboard layouts change, and there can’t be a one product fits all solution for the PWM area. It’s not a bad idea per se, but Thermalright will always be on the back foot when trying to produce a better heatsink that also allows a wide level of compatibility.

As a result, finding a performance motherboard with the ability to mount one of these coolers, without leading to high PWM temps is a difficult one. From my experience, only entry-level motherboards running lower-end chipsets still use separate heatsinks, which are the precisely the wrong category for this cooler (why put an extreme cooler on a non-extreme part?). You can check the compatibility of this cooler here.