Nah Frostytech is just the review site. I've just started looking into CPU coolers... I think its terribly interesting. For such seemingly low-tech devices, they are incredibly complex.
For instance, <A HREF="http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1011" target="_new">Zalman "flower" coolers</A> are pretty darn impressive looking, but other than that, their design is very much flawed. You see, when you talk about heat passing through metal, you can think of it in pretty much the same terms as electricity. That is to say, the thicker the conducter, the less resistance the heat will encounter. With the Zalman coolers being nothing but a sandwich of incredibly thin copper plates, most of the heat dissipation occurs right at the base. The rest of the surface area is mostly wasted, due to the fact that the fins are so thin, and present too much resistance for the heat to travel all the way out to the ends of the fins, rendering much of the heatsink relatively useless. Thats why the Zalman doesn't perform nearly as impressively as it looks.
The same goes for most of the other shiny copper block heatsinks that are flooding the market nowadays. Most of them have a solid base, with fins or pegs rising from the base at a perpindicular angle. They aren't exactly slouches when you put a big nasty fan on them, but with the fins being a constant width, the longer the fin, the higher the resistance the heat encounters as it travels up the fin. It doesn't matter how long the fin is, if there is too much resistance for the heat to make use of it. Its just wasted material, or decoration. There are much smarter designs.
Ideally, you want as thick a base as you can get to allow the heat to efficiently travel to the cooling fins, and you want as many cooling fins as possible. Therefore designs like the <A HREF="http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1397" target="_new">Verax P14Cu</A> heatsink are quite effective. It has a very thick base, that extends outward and up the sides, to give the heat lots of places to travel. Also it has tapered cooling fins, which is a very smart design. As I stated before, the thicker the conductor, the less resistance to heat. So, the most effective fin design would be tapered. After the heat travels to the fin, it begins to dissipate in the air. The more surface area the heat gets to, the faster it can dissipate. Therefore in order to allow the heat to maximize the entire surface area of the fin, you want to present a decent path all the way to the end of the fin.
Another smart design is the <A HREF="http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1260" target="_new">Vantec VP4C7040</A>. Not only does it use tapered fins, but it also has chunky bits of metal arranged in a sort of cross design rising from the core of the heatsink, with fins on each side of the cross. This gives the heat a low-resistance path to each of the fin-covered surface areas of each side of the cross. Very smart indeed, as this essentially quadruples the amount of effective cooling surface area available to the CPU. The thermal tests validate the design, showing this particular HSF to be one of the best Frostytech has tested.
Its not the quietest, but it does use a very nifty <A HREF="http://www.dansdata.com/tmdfan.htm" target="_new">TMD (Tip Magnetic Drive) fan</A>, which is quieter than most, for the amount of air it moves. Most fans are powered by a motor in the hub, while the TMD is driven from the outside, with magnets in the fan blades being repulsed by coils mounted to the outer housing. You could conceivably reduce the speed of the TMD fan to make it quieter, and given the high effectiveness of the heatsink, still have an effective cooling solution.
Also Coolermaster has an innovative solution to the diminishing returns of extra long fins. They use heatpipes in some of their coolers to provide a low-resistance heatpath to the ends of the fins. Read more on that <A HREF="http://dansdata.com/coolercomp_p2.htm#hhc001" target="_new">here</A>.
I've only begun to look at HSFs, but so far, I think the Vantec is the most impressive.
I only glanced at the design of the Glacial Tech 4310 Pro, and its not too bad. No chunky bits for the heat to travel along, but at least it does have very nice tapered fins. Also it appears the fins are not cross cut. As in, rather than a forest of fins, you have fins that are more like parallel walls. Whether this is good or bad is impossible to say without testing. On one hand, they might provide a less resistive heatpath than a forest of fins, on the other hand, the wall design might restrict airflow through the fins. Frostytech doesn't have a review for the 4310 pro, but they do have one for the similar <A HREF="http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1284" target="_new">4300</A>. It was a solid performer, but it was actually 14 decibels <i>louder</i> than the stock Intel cooler. Perhaps that was something that was addressed with the 4310.
Anyway, I've rambled on enough. Hope this info helps!
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Armadillo<font color=orange>[</font color=orange><font color=green>TcC</font color=green><font color=orange>]</font color=orange> at Lanwar and MML<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by syndil on 07/16/03 09:54 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5341387" target="_new">Busting Sh@t Up!!!</A> 
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