The Thermalright HR-03

Thermalright has a well-deserved reputation for making quality enthusiast-oriented cooling products. It was a little surprising, then, that its V1 Ultra VGA cooler didn't shine all that much compared to the competition in our June heat-pipe video card cooler roundup. It displayed middle-of-the-road performance despite upper-echelon pricing.

Delightfully, the engineers at Thermalright appear to have taken this as a personal insult to their heat dissipating skills, and have toiled non-stop with complicated thermal dynamics equations for several months to bring the V1 Ultra's replacement to life. Well, that's just a hypothetical scenario I concocted, but what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that they have made something better. Gentlemen and ladies, I give you the result of their labours: the Thermalright HR-03.

Thermalright HR-03 Details

I don't pretend to understand what HR-03 stands for, but what is immediately apparent upon first looking at the beast is that it is, well, honking huge for a VGA cooler.

Thermalright isn't messing around - this thing has a singular purpose in life, and that is to remove heat from your graphics processor. It's rugged looking, but has a sort of brutal grace about it; the same kind of menacing aura you see in a large Dodge pickup truck with a Hemi under the hood.