What defines a good heatsink

[Guest]

Ok, I've been looking at various reviews of the 'new' generation heatsinks with great interest and gather some thoughts:

Swiftech 462, Noisecontrol Silverado, Blizzard tbird along with Millenium thermal solutions' Glaciator (not to be confused with OCZ's Gladiator..) seemed to be the best achievable air-cooled solutions. While Swiftech is noisy, coupled with requirement of generous spacing around the socket, it could potentially be a limitation for certain mobo users. As for the rest of the pack, while they maintain a reasonable noise level, some of them are real HEAVY hitters: (Glaciator at 770g) This never was a problem before since everything was made with aluminium hence the relatively light weight. Now with weight trending toward 1kg I certainly would be worrying about my socket falling off!

Moreover, with prices of certain heatsinks coming in a tad below U$100 (shipping included) this can easily cost more than what you paid for your CPU. It wasn't that long ago that I paid less than U$20 for my golden orb on the celeron and back then Alpha at $35 was the ultimate but now???

So here I'm, a bit torn but leaning slightly toward the blizzard at $58 for its relatively light weight, relatively low noise, good cooling. Was really keen on MTS' Glaciator but its weight scares me a bit and its release has been prosponed many times. As for swiftech and noisecontrol, I'll pass and keep the money for my next Duron. What do you think?

 

[peteb]

I think you're being sensible - if you are not running an expensive, overclocked chip, why spend big $$ on a heatsink?

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[paulcalmond]

Up until quite recently light and cheap heatsinks made out of aluminium were adequate for many peoples needs, particularly with Intel cpus which consume much less power than AMD cpus and hence produced less heat to be dissipated.

However with todays high performance cpu e.g my AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) without overclocking, it runs at 1200MHz at 1.75V and when at 100% cpu load (SETI running) produces approx 63W, without effective cooling this would soon overheat. The situation is different for Intel cpu such as Pentium III which at 1000MHz produces less than half the heat, since its maximum dissipation is 28W.

Apparently the newly released AMD Athlon 4 (Palomino) produces approx 20% less heat even though it runs at 1.4GHz, but will still require a quite good heatsink fan (HSF).

The reason for the increased weight with modern HSF is that there are two main ways of improving the effectiveness of a cooler (which incidentally is measured in C/W - degrees C temperature increase per Watt power consumed)
one is to increase the surface area of the heatsink which involves more metal being used. The other method is to use materials that require more heat energy to cause them to increase temperature i.e materials that have a higher specific heat capacity (measured in J/Kg/K) and higher thermal conductivity (W/mK): In order of increasing thermal conductivity: aluminium, copper, silver.

Whilst the last two are better materials than aluminium they have higher density which means for a given size of heatsink they will weigh more.

Several of the heatsinks you mentioned are heavier than the 300g limit set by AMD for mounting via spring clips fastened to the cpu socket. In their defence the makers say that their products do not produce a risk of damage to the socket if a system is transported by car, but if it is to be shipped via post etc. then you are required to dismount the sink first.

I think for higher performance systems in future the way to go is the route Swiftech have taken with the MC462: with the sink bolted to the motherboard.


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by paulcalmond on 05/24/01 03:17 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[ejsmith2]

I'd go with copper.

True, you risk breaking the white socket mount when you move the computer, but unless you have the time for Lan parties every weekend/weekday, it's not a terrible procedure.