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In the Forums... |
Posted: March 16, 2001 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Material The most common material you’ll find for heatsinks is Aluminum -- specifically Al6030 and Al6035. Alumnimum is widely used because it conducts heat well, and it’s light enough to create large size heatsinks. Aluminum is also an easy metal for manufacturers to work with when they forge or extrude heatsinks. Recently, copper has started to show up from various manufacturers. The most famous company to use copper in its heatsinks for the PC is Alpha Novatech and is the first company to implement copper into its heatsink designs. The Alpha PAL3035 is one of the most well known heatsinks and is in use today by a large number of computer users. I personally recommend that heatsink to everyone who asks. Copper conducts heat better than aluminum does but it’s difficult to manufacture heatsinks out of, and its weight also presents a problem during transportation. When a manufacturer ships a computer, it has to consider the weight of the heatsink as an important quality control factor. During shipping, any number of jolts and bumps can jar and dislocate the heatsink, causing serious damage to the CPU, motherboard and other system components. Generally, anything over 350 grams is approaching excessive weights. A number of manufacturers are coming out with all copper heatsinks to gain mind share and offer better performance over traditional aluminum based heatsinks. Whether those all-copper heatsinks perform better is still up for debate. But currently, the majority of heatsinks are still aluminum and still offer more than adequate performance for today’s processors. Surface Efficiency Surface efficiency, or smoothness, is also an extremely important factor in determining the performance of a heatsink. Any variation on the contact surface can totally ruin the transfer process or make an otherwise good heatsink worthless. Below is a diagram of a badly polished heatsink base.  This heatsink has too many gaps in its base Not enough of the CPU core actually comes in contact with the heatsink itself. It’s impossible to find a perfectly polished heatsink base, but you can come very close. For all general purposes though, applying heatsink compound will fill in the imperfections of a heatsink enabling heat to transfer more effectively. Heatsink compound spreads when the heatsink is pressed down and fills in all the gaps and becoming part of the entire heatsink itself to provide a perfectly flat surface. |
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