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Introduction

When people think of air coolers, they think of huge tower CPU heatsinks, stylish exhaust fan setups on GPUs and miniaturised chipset fan and ‘sink combos. However little effort has ever been put into memory cooling. Attempts to cool RAM in the past have been met with more ratings with tiny 40 and 60mm fans just not being upto the job. Thermalright has stepped upto the challenge with their High Rise HR07 memory coolers; lets see if they can go where others have not.

Specifications

Features

Bits and Box

The HR07 comes in two fairly plain looking boxes. They are both in the typical cardboard brown colour with some simplistic black prints of the product on them. There is also a small window to give you a little glimpse of the product.

The back of the box shows a slightly more detailed picture of the heatsinks and gives you a short feature list too.

Inside the box along with the HR07 you get a Thermalright sticker, some mounting brackets and screws and three thermal pads.

The High Rise

The HR07 consists of two heatspreaders each connected to twin heatpipes (read what a heatpipe is in our glossary here) which in turn connect to two large heatsinks sporting a multitude of wide aluminium fins.

The heatpipes run all the way through the centre of the heasink allowing for maximum heat dissipation.

On the front of the heatspreader is the Thermalright name and logo so people know who’s responsible for cooling those toasty modules.

Installation

The first step in attatching an aftermarket memory cooler with heatspreaders is to remove the original ones. The kit I am using for my hardware guinea pigs is a pair of 1gb sticks of OCZ Special OPS Urban Elite 6400. To take those off I simply slipped my trusty flat headed screwdriver under the edge and gave it a wiggle.

The next stage was to remove the nasty heat pad residue. Unfortunately the stock OCZ heatspreaders are held on with adhesive strips so that clips arn’t necessary. Although this does relieve pressure on the modules it ends up leaving a large portion of the adhesive behind when you remove the spreaders. So it was out with the TIMClean (reviewed here) and kitchen roll and on with the scrubbing.

Having cleaned off the left over junk from my memory chips I proceeded to attatch the Thermalright (TR) supplied heatpads. TR supply your with 3 different heatpads per module: one wide, two thin. People with single sided modules should use the large heatpad on the side without the chips on and a thin on the one with, and those with double sided modules should us the thin pads on both sides.

With the heatpads properly in place they slip easily into the heatspreaders and you can widen or lessen the gap between the individual spreaders by gently bending the edges to give a tighter or looser fit if you wish.

With the modules installed correctly it was onto getting them into the motherboard. This was a little difficult due to the way I had the cooler facing; the heatpipes were brushing on the 8800GTS installed at the time. Taking the High Rise out and switching around the modules made it much easier and they installed without any more mishaps.

Next came the slightly more fiddly bit; installing the fan. First it was on with the mounting clips for it:

Then it was onto installing the fan itself (I chose a low spinning 80mm fan from noiseblocker) which with my trusty lengthy screwdriver was no problem. However, getting the fan into the right position to screw it in was quite difficult as I was caught between my large tower CPU cooler and the power cables for my hard drives. Those with large CPU coolers may find this a bit of a squeeze but it still should be possible to fit it.

Testing

For memory cooler testing we need to use a temperature probe (As there isn’t an onboard sensor) to take the temperature during idle and load situations.

The temperature probe was placed inside the heatspreader and was rested against a memory chip. The temperatures were taken when the PC had sat at idle for 30 minutes and had been fully loaded for 30 minutes.

The rig that this cooler was tested in is as follows:

Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.7ghz
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Silverstone Olypia 650w
MSI 8800GTS
OCZ 2gb Special Ops PC6400 @ 900mhz w/ 2.0v
Spire Blackfin case with Noiseblocker 120mm’s fitted in the front and rear; side panel 120mm fan disabled.

Results are given for the temperature with the original OCZ heatpsreaders, with the High Rise HR07 without a fan and with a fan.

All temperatures are given in degrees celsius.

Results

	Stock OCZ Heatspreader	HR07 without fan (Passive)	HR07 with fan (Active)
Idle	34	30	25
Load	40	36	28

As you can see, the HR07 makes a substantial difference to memory temperatures. Simply moving from the OCZ heatspreaders to the HR07 without a fan causes huge temperature drops though the main drop is when adding a fan to the heatsink.

Unfortunately running these modules cooler than they had been did not give me anymore of an overclock than I had already hoped, but it did keep both modules nice and cool while I was messing about putting 2.25 volts through. I imagine that those with extreme voltage memory kits would see a large overclocking benefit from this cooler as it would keep their RAM nice and chilly while they tweaked away.

Cost

The High Rise HR07 can be found for around £18. Be aware that this £18 does not include a fan so for this kit you could be looking at just over £20 altogether.

Conclusion

The High Rise HR07 from Thermalright does give fantastic temperature results but its cost may be a bit much for some people; it’s also a bit fiddly when installing. However, if you can’t quite stomach the idea of watercooling your memory, or simply can’t afford it, but want that ever so helpful chilled pair of sticks, then the HR07 is right up your street.

Pros	Cons
Great cooling ability, especially when a fan is added	Price with fan is probably more than £20
Looks Impressive	Bit of a fiddly install

I’d like to thank our sponsors Thermalright for providing us with this cooler.

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