Thermalright HR-01 X Server Heatsink

The HR-01 X Heatsinks:

The HR-01 X comes in the standard Thermalright packaging, which is an extra thick cardboard box with heavy foam padding. All necessary accessories and installation instructions are included. The retention mechanism pivots in the middle to allow the heatsink orientation to be horizontal or vertical, depending on your motherboard's layout.

The HR-01 X is nothing short of beauty in engineering. There are six heatpipes that run through the base of the heatsinks and up through the fins on each side. The design is such that only a low RPM fan is required for proper operation. Some size consideration had to be made to allow this heatsink to fit a dual socket board, most Intel boards have the two sockets right next to each other.

Installation & Heatsink Comparison:

The Intel Xeon Retail heatsinks fit a dual socket board with little fuss and plenty of clearance. While they are solid chunks of copper (great for thermal conductivity), their small size means the fans often have to rev up during heavy usage. As mentioned before, this server sits in my office and must run as silent as possible. Note the location of the ATX power cables routed along the exhaust fan above the PCI-e slots.

After mounting the pair of HR-01 X heatsinks, I had to re-route the power cables (no big deal). It just goes to show how much more massive these heatsinks are in comparison to the retail ones. The two fans are mounted so the bottom is blowing air into the heatsinks, while the top fan is blowing away from the heatsink (so all airflow is going up). If there was just a little more clearance between the two heatsinks a fan could fit between them, but as-is this is the only configuration that works on my board.

Depending on your motherboard, there might be clearance issues trying to mount these heatsinks using the little provided wrench. I found that using a small (but very long) blade screwdriver worked better to tighten down the retention mechanism where I didn't have clearance next to the socket. My particular problem was the DIMM slots were right up against one of the CPU socket's, and the northbridge heatsink was close to the other one.