Thermalright HR-10

As I have already mentioned above, Thermalright IFX-14 comes bundled with an HR-10 heatsink that is used to cool the back side of the mainboard PCB right beneath the processor socket:

This heatsink is built around two flattened heatpipes. Its array uses 25 perforated aluminum plates (12 holes in each plate). HR-10 measures 134.5 x 163 x 112mm and weighs 130g:

A small heat-spreader with a 30 x 30mm base contacts the mainboard PCB through an included thermal pad and is pressed to it with a backplate of Thermalright IFX-14 cooler:

Before installing this heatsink you have to put two stickers to both sides of the heat-spreader. One of them will serve as a thermal pad:

After that HR-10 is set beneath the backplate with a special dent in the center of it. Then the backplate is screwed on to the board:

You shouldn’t worry about creating a short circuit, because the heatpipes are covered with non-conductive film. Besides, there is about ~2mm gap between the heatpipes and the mainboard:

HR-10 is compatible with such Thermalright coolers as HR-01 (X), SI-128, SI-128 SE, Ultima-90 and Ultra-90. According to the manufacturer, this additional cooler reduces the CPU temperature by 4ºC under maximum workload. It seems like a pretty significant efficiency improvement, but will it stick in real tests? We are going to check things out for sure, and now let’s take a look at Thermalright IFX-14 and HR-10 installed into an open testbed at the same time:

Moreover, HR-10 can be equipped with an additional 80 x 80 x 25mm fan (though there are no retention clips for this fan among bundled accessories). Also, I would like to add that we used an open testbed as an example for a reason: this entire system wouldn’t fit into our ASUS ASCOT 6AR2-B system case. Therefore, if you are going to get yourself all these parts, make sure your system case is big and wide enough, Full Tower type would be a good bet. New BTX cases are incompatible with IFX-14 and HR-10.

Thermalright IFX-14 with an HR-10 is priced at $90. However, HR-10 may also be purchased separately for ~$35.