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Thermalright HR-02 dissected

by on27 August 2010

Index



Thermalright currently has a mounting mechanism that works only with Intel sockets 775/1156/1366, which leaves AMD out of the picture. The company did, however, announce it’s working on an AMD socket mounting mechanism.

HR-02 doesn’t come with a provided fan but Thermalright included two brackets – one for a 12cm and one for a 14cm fan, so you can mount two fans. We ended up using the 12cm fan bracket when we were mounting a second 14cm fan, but naturally this is not advisable as the fan won’t be held properly.

HR-02-box1

You’ll also find a long screwdriver, installation manual, Chill Factor3 thermal paste and anti-vibration elements with sticky tape for one fan. 

HR-02-box2

Setting the HR-02 up is pretty simple, and the mounting procedure is pretty much the same for all supported Intel sockets as the backplate and the rest of the parts are universal.

HR-02-mounting-1

The motherboard on the picture is Elitegroup’s X58B-A. Mounting the HR-02 on it was a breeze and as Thermalright says, HR-02 is compatible with most motherboards.

HR-02-mounting-2

HR-02-mounting-3

HR-02-mounting-4

The following picture clearly shows that the cooler’s heatsink is nudged forwards, in order to boost efficiency by utilizing the rear panel fan.

HR-02-mounting-5

Thermalright HR-02’s motherboards compatibility list includes many motherboards currently on the market, and you can check out the list here. We’d however advise you to take the list with a grain of salt as we managed to mount the HR-02 on an EVGA X58 FTW3 with ease, despite the fact that the motherboard was listed as incompatible.

HR-02-FTW3-compatible-1

HR-02-FTW3-compatible-2

EVGA Classified 4-Way SLI motherboard is listed as compatible but we’d rather put it as partially-compatible. The reason for this is that the chipset’s large heatsink will make you turn the HR-02 towards the top panel fan.

EVGA Classified 4-Way SLI, on the other hand, is listed as compatible. Unfortunately, in our book it should be listed as semi-compatible or something of the sort as its large chipset heatsink got in the way of HR-02, so we had to turn the latter towards the top panel fan. Naturally, in this case you’ll have to rely on the top-panel one, if you have one of course. That didn’t bother our HR-02 too much placed inside HAF X case as it was still pretty efficient.

HR-02-evga-4way-sli-compatible

We’ve shown you initial results scored by the HR-02, but our testbed used an older system based on EVGA’s 780i SLI motherboard (socket 775), which also isn’t fully compatible with the HR-02. We easily fixed the problem by mounting a small passive heatsink with two smaller heatsink (pictures below).

HR-02-evga-780i-sli-compatible-1

HR-02-evga-780i-sli-compatible-2


Last modified on 27 August 2010
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