Testing:

To test the cooling potential of the Thermalright HR-05 SLI chipset cooler at idle and load conditions, it was installed in a test system with the following equipment:

» AMD Opteron 185 processor
» DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard
» 1024MB G.SKILL Extreme DDR (2 x 512MB) memory
» 3x Western Digital 36GB 10K RPM SATA-I hard drives
» Two eVGA GeForce 7800 GT CO SLI 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E
» Pioneer DL DVDRW
» SB Audigy 2z Platinum sound card
» Enermax Enlobal 120mm fan

The idle condition was established by powering the system with no applications running for a period of at least 30 minutes. The load condition was established by running Orthos for a period of at least 60 minutes.


The chart below shows the temperatures of the stock cooler and the HR-05 IFX SLI at idle and load, while an ambient temperature of 24 degrees Celsius was maintained. The chipset temperatures are as reported by the Smartguardian monitoring software included with the motherboard.


The thermal results of the stock cooler are modest, with a load temperature of 50C. The Thermalright HR-05 IFX SLI does a much better job at cooling the chipset with a load temperature of 43C, when no cooling fan is added. If there is a fan nearby blowing air toward the Thermalright HR-05 IFX SLI, the load temperature drops to 40C. So, the Thermalright HR-05 IFX SLI out cools the stock chipset cooler by 10C with a silent 120mm fan in the area.

The stock cooler is very noisy in both the idle and load conditions with the tiny fan spinning at roughly 7000RPM. With or without a fan, the HR-05 IFX SLI is a much more effective cooler, and can do so in silence. Additionally, with the stock fan cooling the chipset it actually blows hot air on the top video card making the GPU temperature rise slightly, as well.