Component Technical Properties

The Thermalright HR-02 Macho Cooler has 31 blades and a single dissipating body. It comes bundled with a 140mm fan with excellent performance and low overall noise, even at maximum rpm. The processing and final performance of the dissipating blades are unfortunately affected by the decision to offer a low-cost product; in fact, the blades themselves are not welded on either one another or heat pipes. This leads to a certainly lower overall performance, but, given the overall size, this does not affect significantly the efficiency. There are structural optimizations that lead to increase the dissipating surface area at same size, such as small vertical openings in the 31 horizontal fins and the center slot that serves both to the mounting and to create more ventilation and heat dissipation, isolating, in part, the two sets of heat pipes.

The base is well made, though not perfectly mirror lapped. Note the slight convexity, Thermalright proprietary feature that has been used in order to allow a better contact area. Unfortunately there are only two mounting brackets for a single 140mm fan; you can still buy them separately, as there are the mounting holes to create a push-pull system.

Interesting peculiarity of this model is that the base itself is significantly offset from the center of mass of the heat sink itself. This configuration adopted by Thermalright has two main benefits: one is the adoption of high-profile RAM, a solution that turns out to be very important during assembly, without compromising the installation of performing modules with aftermarket dissipation systems. The other clear advantage is the ability to exploit the extraction fan of the case, which comes to lie very close to the back of the sink. This makes setting up the HR-02 Macho also in "passive" mode, i.e. using only the fan of the case.