My Thermalright HR-05 adventure *56k behold**

[G.Foyle]

I recently bought myself a HR-05 to accompany Thermalright's Ultra-120.
It was bought with future mobos on mind, so I didn't check if it would fit my DS3 - I would have use for it anyway.

But when i got it i thought better to mount it than to let it lay in the box, and so began my adventure:

This is 965P northbridge, cleaned of stock thermal pad and with foam ring that came with HR-05 (as a security measure to provide support to the heatsink, so it won't rest on core alone):


Thermalright provides 3 mounting brackets, each of different lenght, and two plastic clips with springs. It turned out that none of the brackets fits: one is too long, one too short, and the third is about 1 mm too long:
(stock thermal paste can be seen; it's about 0.5 mm thick layer of gray goo)

Of course you can fix that by drilling a hole that 1 mm closer, but at that time I had no tools to do that and I was eager to test the heatsink, so i devised another mounting method, for which I needed (from top, clockwise):

1) a mounting bracket (the one that was a bit too long)
2) two metal washers and two nuts
3) two springs taken off TR's plastic clips
4) two screws with metal washers and insulating washers
5) a elastic plastic pipe, that was used to protect the tip of my brothers' finest detail brush.

I put the screws throught the board, with insulating washers protecting circuits from any shortage.


Next i turned the mobo back, applied AS5 to the NB core, and laid down the pieces of plastic pipe - the purpose of which will soon be clear.


It happens so that NB is very close to CPU socket on this board, and it's a real pain to tighten the screws while not moving the heatsink (there's thermal paste already on the core!). SO i thought that i would tighten the screws while the heatsink rests on plastic pipes; it doesn't touch the core and paste yet and you can even turn it around to have better grip on the nuts.
So i tighten the screws:

Notice the detail in red circle: the plastic pipe is still there, preventing the heatsink to contact the core.
Then I slighly lifted the heatsink, removed the plastic pipes and carefully seated the heatsink on the core. After tightening the screws again it's ready, seated parallel to Ultra-120 (so that the fan would fit on the Ultra; there is really very little space between Ultra and HR-05):

Notice the screws are not perpendicular to board, because the bracket is longer than distance between holes in board. If I could shorten the bracket by drilling another hole in it, I would have used washers and nuts on both sides of the board, so that the screws would be firm and won't move.

EDIT: Added distance pic. As you can see 80mm fan would fit on HR-05, but with CPU fan blowing right there ther's no need for.


This was not meant as a review so there won't be any results and temps, but I can say I have gained a little FSB (~ 15 MHz) after changing that ugly, copper-painted alluminium piece and I feel much safer now when running NB on increased voltage.
I just felt like sharing with that, and I hope my observations on mounting will be useful to someone.
And please forgive my English