Guide to Aftermarket Cooling Solutions - Aluminum Heatsinks
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Most CPU manufacturers ship aluminum heatsinks with their processors. These heatsinks offer very little performance because of aluminum's characteristics. Most aluminum heatsinks need a very powerful fan to dissipate the heat efficiently.
Basic all aluminum heatsink with very little performance
As processors became faster and faster, the CPU's temperatures became warmer and warmer because of the inability of aluminum to remove the heat as it is produced. Eventually systems running in excess of 1.6ghz reached such high temperatures that the aluminum coolers could no longer be considered efficient. This drove heatsink manufacturers to produce hybrid heatsinks.
Hybrid heatsinks
Because of the problems with an all aluminum heatsink, manufacturers moved away from using the standard aluminum block type heatsink and started introducing other materials. Originally they had an aluminum block style heatsink with a copper plate inserted into the base. After minimal performance increases, manufacturers started designing unique coolers from the same materials but moved away from using the traditional block style heatsink to unique heatsinks which are often optimized to use all of the airflow to cool the heatsink's fins. Hybrid heatsinks offer a little more performance than the standard heatsink. Eventually manufacturers removed all of the aluminum altogether and created pure copper heatsinks in various shapes and sizes.
Copper is inserted into the heatsink to pull heat away from the CPU, where the heat is then transferred to the aluminum fins of the heatsink.
Hybrid heatsinks did offer a performance increase over the standard aluminum heatsinks. Unfortunately, just adding a copper insert to the heatsink did not provide a long lasting solution, as CPUs began to run at even higher temperatures in excess of 2.0Ghz. This forced the heatsink manufacturers to design heatsinks which can cool considerably more than the limits of our current processors, with the introduction of pure copper heatsinks.
Next: Copper heatsinks >>
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