[section_title title=”Closer Look”]
Closer Look
Upon first inspection, the cooler doesn’t appear to be *that* large. However, when you place it next to another cooler that springs to mind as a large cooler, such as the Noctua NH-D14 or the Thermalright Silver Arrow Extreme SB-E, it’s another story. The Thermalright HR-22 is as wide as the SB-E with fans installed, without having any fans installed itself! It’s a monster, and that’s putting it lightly. It is in fact, Thermalright’s largest heatsink to date in terms of its surface area. Am I scaring you off yet and making you wonder how it doesn’t snap a motherboard clean in half? Hopefully not!
You may be wondering why there is a large hole in the centre of the heatsink, but you’ll have to wait a little longer to find out why it is there. It’s quite obvious if you think about it though. You may also be wondering why it looks lopsided, the reason for that is that the cooler is designed with all components in mind, so that it does not interfere with DIMM slots or with the top PCI Express lane. It does cause a headache when you’re installing it and I will cover that in the installation section.
Time to move on, swiftly, before I put any more scary thoughts into your heads. As we can see from the image of the cooler above, there are plenty of those holes which were spoken about in the introduction with regards to the patented design from Thermalright which comes under DPAS. Lots of testing has gone on in the Thermalright laboratory and the point behind these fins and holes are to direct airflow in a more channelled manor rather than having it go anywhere and everywhere. What this in turn provides is better cooling performance whilst still remaining completely silent at the same time. When the cooler is used in conjunction with the proprietary add-on kit that is supplied by Thermalright, there can be as much as a 10% improvement in the cooling performance of this cooler when used in passive modes. The way that the holes in the cooler act on the airflow can only be described in so much detail. In order to illustrate it, Thermalright have provided an image on the HR-22’s page which demonstrates its affect on the airflow. As you can see, the air is channelled to go in a certain direction, rather than all over the place which would create both stagnant areas and it would also mean that there would be hot pockets of air too which will do nothing but increase your CPU temperature.
Image courtesy of Thermalright
An ultimate cooler would not be complete with no less than eight heatpipes to carry heat away from the base and into the large surface area what is of course one of the key features of the Thermalright HR-22. The heatpipes are 6mm in diameter and they are, according to Thermalright, ideal for high TDP processors. Whether I’d let my i7-4930K sit under a cooler with no fan on the side is another matter and I’d be constantly worrying about its temperature, but I do believe that there are some valid and definitely viable places where this would be applicable. If silence is an absolute must in a location such as a music studio for example, passive cooling is usually the only way to go if you want complete and absolute silence from your PC. From this angle, you can also see the bottom design of the fins which contain the holes for the airflow channelling as mentioned previously.
