Whats the best heatsink only?

the swiftech mcx-462
and there's a separate forum for these things, fyi

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The Thermalright SLK-800 is my pick.

XP 2500+ Barton
A7N8X Dlx
2x512MB Corsair PC3200
MSI GF3 Ti500 w/64MB DDR
16x DVD-ROM
2x80GB 7200RPM Maxtor
Onboard audio

My computer is bigger than your computer....

Alpha PAL 8045. It's expensive, but its very good.

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Another vote for the SLK-800.

Not a big fan of the SLK-800.. the performance doesn't really justify the high cost of that heatsink... Try Vanter Aerflow... works great on AMD chips.

To err is human... to really screw things up you need a computer!

I hate to be the one to cast a black cloud on this idea, but having the fan any distance from the heatsink, even an inch, is going to greatly reduce it's ability to keep the thing cool.

Run a fan in open air and make note of the way the breeze from it disperses. It does not travel out of the fan in a straight line... it comes out in a cone shaped pattern on a very steep angle to the blades. Add to that the geography of your motherboard and it may well be that less than a third of the output of that fan will actually hit the heatsink and do the job you want.

It is likely you will end up with a very hot CPU no matter what heatsink you use in that arrangement.

There really is a good engineering reason why these things are built as they are and there is a solid reason why they all look more or less alike... that's what works. Fan on fins ensures all the air of the fan goes through the heatsink. Square boxy shapes are used to expose maximum cooling surface to the fan's output. Hybrid construction (copper bottom aluminum fins) is used to replace AMD's missing heat spreader.

Experimentation is fun and sometimes very educational, but heat sink design is as old as power transistors. It's very well understood at this point in time and I would worry that trusting any widely variant method might lead to trouble down the road...


--->It ain't better if it don't work<---