Installation on AMD Athlon 64:

The clip is easy to use and makes this one of the easiest tower heatsinks to install on Athlon 64. When the heatsink is in place there seems to be room for rotating it clock and counter-clock wise. However if you look closely again at the base of the heatsink you will see that at the sides there are 2 small ridges.



The HR-01’s clip on system also has a drawback, you can not change the orientation, so if the CPU socket is facing the wrong way, you are out of options. On the DFI NF3 board that is the case; the heatsink is facing the wrong way… so at first I was enthusiast about the fact that I could turn the HR-01 a bit; however in practice I noticed a large increase in CPU temperatures (close to overheating) when doing this, meaning that the small ridges at the side of the heatsink were the cause of bad contact when trying to turn the HR-01. If Thermalright is able to lower these ridges below the base, you would be able to point the heatsink almost every which way you want.

I must admit I’m not much of a DIY person; the only casemods I’ve done turned out horrible - they didn't looked bad but performed good (thermal wise with all the blowholes;)); and while my “hardware killed” list is not very extensive compared to amount that has passed through my hands, I do tend to catch any “newbie” prone errors which could be made, mostly because I can get clumsy. With that said, I have sufficiently prepared you for the photo below; I mounted a fan using an old mouse cord.


Thermalright HR-01 with fan “mounted”

Beside the ghetto fan mounting you can also see that the HR-01 is clearly pointing the wrong way, this will have a negative effect on performance.

I compared the HR-01 to Scythe Ninja (which has fan mounting clips) and the Scythe NCU-2000 (does not have fan mounting clips – NCU-2005 is version which does have these). So I repeated my ghetto fan mounting mod:


Scythe NCU-2000 with fan “mounted”

The NCU-2000 can be rotated 90°C so the fan blows towards the rear of the case.


Performance and Noise :

The temperature results below are taken with active cooling, the passive cooling tests can be found at the overall performance comparison pages.

First at stock speeds:



The NCU and HR-01 are very closely matched, the higher PWM temperature with HR-01 can be attributed to the fact it’s not blowing air towards the back. CPU temperatures with HR-01 would likely also be lower if you could orientate the HR-01 correctly. The Scythe Ninja takes comfortable lead in this test, and stays ahead even with Papst at 50% fan speed.

Increase the heat:



The stock AMD cooling solutions are close to 4 times louder as the tower heatsinks with the silent Papst 120mm fan, the NCU-2000 barely keeps the system running stable, the HR-01 also comes close to dangerous values, PWM is very high. The Shogun and Ninja are evenly matched and have a comfortable 5-10°C lead over the competition.

Thermalright did not design the HR-01 to be used with active cooling and it shows, the performance numbers show it trailing the latest tower heatsinks. The fact that the unit is orientated wrong doesn’t help either.

Let’s see how the HR-01 does on a S775 system ->