Thermalright HR-05 SLI Chipset Cooler is cool

Bought a Thermalright HR-05 SLI Chipset Cooler to try to silence my overclocked AMD X2 4200+ system.



The spec is:

Corsair HX 520W PSU
DFI RDX200 CF-DR
AMD X2 4200+ (IHS removed and running at 250 x 11 = 2750 with default 1.35v)
Thermaltake Big Typhoon (bolted down)
ATI X800XL (Zalman cooler)
2 x Corsair 1GB C2PT PC3200 (running with 166 divider)

With the standard DFI chipset cooler while running orthos (blend priority 9) and rthdribl the chipset temp was 60c and it's fan was incredibly noisy running at over 7000 RPM. The CPU core temps were 45c/50c and the PWMIC temp was 64c (toasty).

Now with the HR-05 SLI chipset cooler while running orthos and rthdribl after 5 mins the chipset temp is at 43c and of course it's silent as there is no fan on it. The CPU core temps is at 45c/50c and PWMIC is at 51c and the fans (cpu 120mm, two 80mm case fans and the Zalman fan on the X800XL) are configured to run whisper quiet. At a guess I'd say it's somewhere around 20 db at a distance of half a metre. The ambient room temperature is reasonably high at 26.1c due to having the heating on as it's quite cold outside.

At idle the chipset temp is 41c, PWMIC is 48c and CPU core temps are 35c/39c (motherboard reported CPU temp is 37c and the CPU fan speed is set to off until it reaches 35c). If I reconfigure the CPU fan to run at ~1000 RPM when idle the CPU core temps go down to 25c/30c.

So with the standard DFI chipset cooler it was noisy even at idle and incredibly noisy/heat saturated at full load and now with the HR-05 SLI it's reasonably cool and silent at idle and at full load the temps are still very acceptable and it's still silent!

Definately the most worthwhile £20 spend in a while.

Here is the screenshot at idle:



Another screenshot at load after 2 hours:

just got this myself recently, awesome cooler, got a 80mm silent zalman fan on mine (is NF4 SLI chipset), runs 36c load on a massivily overclocked FSB and system

Nice result.

One note of caution when fitting chipset heatsinks especially to a NF4 based system.

I bought a A8N-SLI Deluxe recently and tried to put a VC-RE chipset cooler on it and it was a tight fit resulting in me chipping the chipset core. The motherboard only reports 256MB ram installed now even when I fill all the slots with 512MB sticks or use my 2 x 1GB sticks. It cost me only £30 delivered so it's not a big loss but had it been a costly brand new motherboard I'd have been slightly more than upset. I managed to get the DFI RDX200 CF-DR (brand new RMA board + all the accessories) for only £22 delivered so it didn't matter too much.

Also I read so many times about the VC-RE being a good replacement northbridge cooler etc but it's pretty much identical to the standard DFI chipset cooler including the noisy airflow and whine it makes when it's running at full speed. Basically the VC-RE I bought really sucks although maybe I was unlucky?

Here's a screenshot of the above setup running at load for 5 mins at a speed of 3GHz (1.525v) instead of 2750MHz:



The CPU core temps are still reasonable because of the CPU being lidless.

I don't believe it'll be be stable for 24 hours (max before was 9 hour iirc) although I found out my old memory was faulty so maybe it caused Orthos to fail before so it might actually be stable at 3GHz. Time will tell.

Another screenshot at load after 45 mins:



The motherboard has sped up all the fans so airflow noise is easily noticable now and I'd hazard a guess at it being around 25db at half a metre but it's easy on the ears as there isn't any whining so although not silent anymore it's still something I could get used to.

It failed at 1 hour 44 mins:



Oh well it's back to 2750MHz at default volts and silence.

str said:

Also I read so many times about the VC-RE being a good replacement northbridge cooler etc but it's pretty much identical to the standard DFI chipset cooler including the noisy airflow and whine it makes when it's running at full speed. Basically the VC-RE I bought really sucks although maybe I was unlucky?

Click to expand...

I was looking at getting one these VC-RE coolers to silently cool my SB chip....

You could put it on a fan controller to make it quiet.

is it easy mountable ?

The HR-05 SLI is very easy to mount just make sure the motherboard is flat and you are careful when pushing in the pins to secure it.

The VC-RE is easy too but the metal with the holes you push the pins into hangs out the end of the cooler quite a bit so in tight spaces it's hard to get the pins in.

EDIT: Forgot to mention it's not that easy to squash the original cooler push pins to get them out so best to use needle nose pliers or something like that and be very careful not to scratch the motherboard PCB.

looks like it would rip the chipset right out heh......ill take your word and add it to me new spec .....

It's very light so I'd say it's safe to use and works wonders at reducing the temperature throughout the motherboard/case. It's effectiveness is likely due to it's ability to dissipate a lot of heat over a period of time.

The small heatsink fans like the VC-RE can cool reasonably well but once it becomes heat saturated and with the fan at full speed there is no time to cool the excess heat it can't cope with so it keeps building up until it reaches it's maximum.

With the HR-05 SLI it's so big that no matter how hot the chipset gets there is always time for heat dissipation resulting in a much lower maximum temperature.