Idea for Thermalright: a variant of the new HR-03 GTX

Pyrokinetic

Senior member
Dec 4, 2005
296
0
0
Hey all, I was just checking out Thermalright's upcoming HR-03 GTX cooler and had an idea so I sent them this following e-mail:

Hi, I was just checking out your upcoming HR-03 GTX cooler because I am soon to be the proud owner of a GTX 260. While I like the design, it is large and with a 25mm fan it takes up a total of 3 PCI slots. I have a large case (a CM Stacker 810) and it would be nice to see a variant of this cooler that sets the cooling fin array perpendicular to and above PCI slots instead of wrapping the heatpipes 180 degrees to make the cooling fins parallel to the card. This would free up the PCI and PCI-E slots that are adjacent to the card while providing cooling and airflow to the entire PCI slot area. Some cases with large side-panel mounted fans would prove very effective with such a cooler.

Just an idea that would be easy to implement and one I would be more interested in purchasing than the HR-03 GTX.

Thank you.


If anybody here likes this idea as well, give a shout out to Thermalright so maybe they could make it. I used their tech support e-mail address as they do not have a general comments section.
 

zerogear

Diamond Member
Jun 4, 2000
5,611
9
81
Between the 2D/3D mode and the fairly efficient stock cooler, I don't see the need for aftermarket ones (unless you plan on going H2O). I currently have a stock 280GTX, overclocked to eVGA FTW Edition, during full load, I barely reach 70C, and during idle, it runs at around 40C in 2D mode.

I have a CM690 with 7x 120mm fans running at 5v, I turn it to 12v when running GPU intensive applications.
 

error8

Diamond Member
Nov 28, 2007
3,204
0
76
The biggest problems with these coolers, although they're great and everything, is that they don't exhaust hot air outside the case. This wasn't an issues with older videocards with lower TDPs, but since the 8800/3870 series things changed. If you look at card that have an even higher power consumption, like 4870, GTX 260-280, using a cooler that dumps the hot air inside the case, it really becomes a problem. Unless you have a very, very good ventilated case, with lots of 120mm fans that spin very fast ( noisy) , the super cooler of the videocard will cool the card but heat up everything else pretty badly, especially the cpu, which is right above the card and its cooler sucks that hot air and uses it too "cool" the chip.

So, IMHO, using something like a HR-03 on a GTX 280-260 is a very bad idea. Better tweak the fan of the card and try to accommodate yourself with the noise, instead of keeping it extra cool, while everything else starts to boil.