Testing
The Thermalright HR-03 Plus heatsink was tested on an nVIDIA 8800 GTX PCI-e video card. Baseline tests were conducted with the stock nVIDIA cooler for reference.
The HR-03 Plus/8800 GTX was tested with a 92mm Panaflo H1A fan at three different speeds. The ambient room air temperature remained constant at 23°C ±0.5°C. The GPU was loaded by running rthdribl.exe (Real-Time HDR IBL) and the GPU temperature was monitored using NVIDIA’s nTune Control Panel.
- SilverStone Zeus 750W power supply
- Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Intel edition motherboard
- Pentium Extreme Edition dual core 955 (3.46 GHz at 1.22 Vcore)
- (2) Corsair CM2X512-8000UL DDR RAM
- nVIDIA 8800 GTX 768MB 575/675 video card
- WD1200JD SATA HDD
- Sony DVD
- Windows XP Pro with SP2
- nForce 97.92 drivers
A high speed 92mm fan was used along with a variable fan speed controller to simulate three different types of fans; high-speed for high-performance and low speed for minimal noise.
92mm Panaflo (FBA09A12H-1BX)
- Hi speed 2,600 rpm
- Med speed 1,900 rpm
- Low speed 1,200 rpm
The following data is presented for comparative purposes only. Your actual results may be different depending on the variables unique to your system (video card, overclock, ambient temperature, case air flow, temperature monitoring, etc).
As you can see from the previous results, the Thermalright HR-03 Plus does an excellent job of cooling the 8800 video card. With the 92mm Panaflo fan running at high speed the idle temperature dropped 15°C and the load temperature dropped 29°C. However, the Panaflo running at high speed is also much noisier than the stock cooler. With the Panaflo fan turned down to a quiet 1,200 rpm’s, the 8800 idle temperature dropped 12°C and the full load temperature dropped 23°C — now that’s more like it!
Keep in mind that the HR-03 Plus does not exhaust any of the waste heat out the back of the case as do most OEM coolers. All the heat dissipated from the video card(s) gets dumped inside the case so you will need good case ventilation to take full advantage of the HR-03 Plus’ performance potential and keep your other goodies (CPU, HDDs, etc.) from running hot.
