Thermalright HR-22 Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]

Conclusion

Passive coolers are scarce. Finding one that won’t cost you a fortune but will still be able to get the job done effectively is even more difficult. You can of course use heat sinks that are designed to be used with fans as a passive design but that’s not their true purpose and sometimes run hotter than passive designs, even with increased surface area, that’s often their downfall in passive situations, due to the lack of airflow. So, does the Thermalright HR-22 manage to take the crown and should it be a cooler which you should want to use in a passive situation? Let’s sum it all up, starting with its performance.

While I didn’t strictly use this cooler in a totally passive environment, there’s an explanation for that. Allow me to explain my reasoning and why I went for this method. Due to my case being on an open test bed with absolutely no airflow from surrounding fans and no air channelling that you’d find within a chassis, I decided to mount the extraction kit. I put a 120mm fan at the end, typical to what you’d find in any case of today, and tested the cooler with some form of airflow rather than with nothing at all. I felt that this was an appropriate way to test the cooler as the tunnel is there and ultimately, it does have that feature available and it isn’t something which isn’t included in the package. I did briefly test it completely passively, and although the results are not portrayed within my findings, I must say that it performed amazingly. Running my i7-4770K at stock, I put a torture loading from Prime95 on to the CPU and it took at least 10 minutes for it to hit 70°c. It held its temperature for a long time and it could easily cope with a stock, or even a mildly overclocked i7-4770K without a single fan coming in contact with the heatsink. It will no doubt do better inside a case, even with minimal airflow.

Installation is something which I did criticise earlier and I must reiterate that this cooler takes time and patience to put together. It takes a bit of logical thinking but it is easily doable if you put some time and thought into it. I fully understand why Thermalright have done the mounting system this way, and it is probably the one of the best when you really think about it. On the other hand, due to the cooler being heavier on the one side does present a bit of a challenge and although it is a bit of a pain to mount, I can’t knock it too much as it does serve its key purpose – to hold the cooler in its place.

Airflow is definitely key to using a passive cooler and as this cooler is nothing short of massive, you definitely need to make sure that the cooler will fit within your chassis. It most likely will fit in as it doesn’t overhang many (if any at all) motherboards so I can’t see it being a problem.

So what is the final verdict then? Well, if I were going to build a completely passive and totally silent rig; would this be my cooler of choice if budget were non-existent? Oh yeah, without a doubt in my mind. It ticks every single box for me. The Thermalright HR-22 is a passive cooler that aims to dominate the market. While it is expensive, it is most likely one of the best passive coolers on the market. If you want the best, you have to pay for it – that’s the story of life. I have nothing to compare it to, but I am confident that this would blow the competition away. It’s design is nothing short of an engineering marvel. Years of research and development went into this cooler and it shows in both its design and its performance. Due to both the way it performed and the design of the cooler itself, I would recommend this in a heartbeat for a passively cooled system with no budgetary constraints. However, budgets usually do not come into question when a totally passive system is required as the passive PSUs are expensive and SSD storage is still not a totally viable manor to store massive amounts of data over a platter based hard drive. Either way, with everything being said, I am proud to award the Thermalright HR-22 with our prestigious Editor’s Choice award as it definitely puts a silence to heat as Thermalright proclaim.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Thermalright for providing us with today’s review sample.