Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU Air Cooler Review @ [H]

Cryorig R1 Ultimate CPU Air Cooler Review - Cryorig is a name that is quite likely new to our fellow enthusiasts. When the company contacted us and asked us to review its news R1 Ultimate cooler, we took a look at the build design and it got us curious. The R1 Ultimate has an overall design that we have seen many times before, but surely had enough "new" to warrant a review.

the front fan should be 120mm , like D14 uses and many other dual tower HS .

This might be a pretty good cooler, but the size and the cost are not what I would deem gold seal of approval material.

You would have to compromise your mainboard and maybe even your case, use less memory or buy low profile, for what? Maybe one degree C lower than a cheaper heatsink.

This would take some good planning to incorporate into a build.

Thank you for the great review and notes, guys, but I don't know that this is gold material. An award should also contain a value component and you explicitly say that: "However, at its MSRP, it might hold less value for you than other alternatives." That doesn't mention the compatibility and size issues either.

I would never have contested silver or lower but in my view gold should be reserved for the truly special products that are "go out and buy this now."

Just as in all other dual tower coolers, this one also blows the air from one tower to the other.

Pray tell, how is the hot air from the first tower supposed to cool the second tower adequately?

With my NH-D14, I have a 120mm fan on the outside of each tower blowing towards the middle.

This drops the temps under load by at least 3-4c.

Make a duct to an exhaust fan to suck the hot air out from the middle of the towers and you drop another 2-3c.

cyclone3d said:

Just as in all other dual tower coolers, this one also blows the air from one tower to the other.

Pray tell, how is the hot air from the first tower supposed to cool the second tower adequately?

With my NH-D14, I have a 120mm fan on the outside of each tower blowing towards the middle.

This drops the temps under load by at least 3-4c.

Make a duct to an exhaust fan to suck the hot air out from the middle of the towers and you drop another 2-3c.

Click to expand...

What you say makes sense. Does your setup expel the hot air directly out of the case?
It would be interesting to see if reversing the setup you describe (side fans pulling out and (w/ and w/o) forced ducting into the center) works better/worse/same. Of particular interest would be if the top center duct were to draw cold air directly from outside the case.

Marc's call was Silver award. It was my call for the Gold award.

As has always been HardOCP logic, sometimes value does not fully equate into the award, exactly like is spelled out. Even givens its few caveats, I like seeing "new" tech being used in the world of air cooling that shows real world performances.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

mynamehere said:

What you say makes sense. Does your setup expel the hot air directly out of the case?
It would be interesting to see if reversing the setup you describe (side fans pulling out and (w/ and w/o) forced ducting into the center) works better/worse/same. Of particular interest would be if the top center duct were to draw cold air directly from outside the case.

Click to expand...

My current setup doesn't expel the hot air directly out of the case. I only had the extra ducting set up for a little bit as it made it extremely difficult to work on anything inside the case. At that time it did expel it directly out of the case via an exhaust fan on the top of my case.

The idea of using a center duct to draw cool air in is a very interesting idea and my current
case would make that configuration pretty easy by using a side cover fan. The only problem I see with using it as an intake and having the fans pull air through the towers is that the fans would need a decently tight seal where they hook onto the fins and the sides of the towers would need to be sealed so it actually makes it pull the air through the fins.

cyclone3d said:

My current setup doesn't expel the hot air directly out of the case. I only had the extra ducting set up for a little bit as it made it extremely difficult to work on anything inside the case. At that time it did expel it directly out of the case via an exhaust fan on the top of my case.

The idea of using a center duct to draw cool air in is a very interesting idea and my current
case would make that configuration pretty easy by using a side cover fan. The only problem I see with using it as an intake and having the fans pull air through the towers is that the fans would need a decently tight seal where they hook onto the fins and the sides of the towers would need to be sealed so it actually makes it pull the air through the fins.

Click to expand...

Do you reverse the normal rear exhaust fan so it blows in to help there rear HS fan ?
I would imagine it would be very close to rear case fan .

EdKiefer said:

Do you reverse the normal rear exhaust fan so it blows in to help there rear HS fan ?
I would imagine it would be very close to rear case fan .

Click to expand...

The "rear" exhaust fan is blowing in. My case is the Lian Li PC-100 so it is actually configured that way by default since the rear is actually the front. The fan is actually mounted on the outside and then the access cover goes on the outside of the case so it is not as close as you would think.

Forgive my ignorance but you have RAM in the closest slot to CPU. Why didn't you run both sticks of RAM?

I also have to wonder how much difference in cooling there would be if the fan was centered on fin pack with the fan fin pack housing installed instead of having 25-30% of fan above and no air into the of fin pack. Surely doing this decreases the cooling ability of the R1 Ultimate.

It would seem logical to use RAM that is 30-40mm tall on a test platform that will be used for large cooler. There is lots of other RAM that is shorter.. like
Vengeance LP and
XMS Classic both 32mm, or even
Dominator/Dominator GT without top which is 43mm.
Vengeance is the tallest Corsair RAM at 52.5mm

Using reasonable height RAM would allow cooler to be tested as it was designed and not modified to fit very tall RAM.

That is the biggest cooler I have ever seen! I expected to see a moon orbiting it in the pictures.