As usual, the HR-03 GT comes shipped in Thermalright's traditional plain brown box. Inside we find a single-page instruction sheet, the cooler itself, a tube of thermal compound, front and rear mounting brackets and assorted hardware, ram/mosfet sinks, fan clips and a case sticker. Thermalright has greatly improved the background and image quality on their stickers from when they first started including these with their products.


The HR-03 GT, like the Plus and R600 versions, has six heatpipes rather than the original four. These take up nearly the full width of the base, which is made from two separate halves soldered together. The six pipes all come out the top of the base and loop up over the height of the card before dispersing throughout the width of the finned heatsink portion. There are 34 fins shaped in a flame pattern similar to Thermalright's other IFX (Inferno) line of heatsinks. You'll also notice their proprietary through-hole design of stamping many small tabs out the side of each fin. The HR-03 is notched for a standard 92x25mm fan, not included.


Both the front and back side of the base have been machined smooth, although like Thermalright's other products, fine ridges remain in the surface. By finishing both sides of the base, the HR-03 can be mounted with the finned portion hanging out the front of the card, or wrapped over the back side. Something that is also different on the HR-03 that I have not noticed on other Thermalright products is that a center portion of each fin appears to have been cut away. This roughly semi-circle shape neatly divides each of the center four heatpipe sections in half, although the two outer-most pipes extend through an unbroken hole in each fin. It appears that the center cut-away sections have been soldered back into place, both to the heatpipe and the larger portion of the fins. I can only conclude that this was done for some manufacturing purpose, possibly to make installing the heatpipes easier?

Now let's have a look at our guinea pig 8800GT.