Thermalright HR-03 VGA Cooler Revealed

Thermalright announced that they have developed a new VGA cooling device based upon heat pipe technology. This time, the cooler from Thermalright comes with some unique advantages such as a very large radiating area and the fact that you can actually mount it in 2 different ways.

This will sound pretty interesting to you. The HR-03 can be mounted in two ways, you can mount it upside down with the radiator facing the back of the card (very good for space but not that efficient when it comes to dissipating heat) or you can mount it classically with the radiator facing the front of the card (takes up 2 slots but is more efficient when it comes to cooling capacity).

The HR-03 solution is quite big in size but that's natural since it integrates a large heatsink with lots of little fins. As it actually takes up quite a lot of space, you can mount it without having to use fans. A passive solution is also preferable in case you hate the noise. Note that the package does not contain any fans so if you want an active cooler, you will have to buy it yourself.

On the performance side, this fellow can keep a x1900 series card as cool as when using its stock cooler(stock coolers performance is 57/89 Celsius degrees on idle/load). This is quite a breakthrough in cooling capacity since the card is completely passive cooled (HR-03 passive performance is 49/92 Celsius degrees on idle/load). Add up a cooler and you'll get a staggering 25 Celsius degrees off the temperature registered when using the stock cooler. This performance puts HR-03 in the first place when it comes to VGA cooling since it even outperforms the Kuformula V1 Plus solution by 10 Celsius degrees.

To keep the story short, in case you need a cooler capable to chill down your card, this is the one for you. I don't know if it can be mounted onto 8800 cards but I hope to see it on top of an 8800 GTX soon.