Aluminium takes on copper in battle of the heat sinks

HUGE, HEAVY all-copper heat sinks are all the rage for today's hot, hungry CPUs. However, do you need them always, in every situation?

Here's a proof that standard aluminum body can still do the job well - at least if it has a copper plate and heat pipes facing the CPU heat spreader, and if the fans do their job well. And you don't necessarily need the extra mini water cooling like the Evercool unit we reviewed in November.

Sometimes, that may mean an unusual fan system - as you see on the photos, Asus V-60 houses its fan in the centre of the heat sink, surrounded by the metal fins. Zaward Sylphee, on the other hand, has two fans rotating in the opposite direction, one on each side of the heat sink body. Both approaches should provide more rapid heat dissipation from the aluminium fins.

The new approaches have an effect on the heat sink size - to accomodate a large fan enclosed within itself, Asus V-60 is truly huge, as you can see from the photo, it could barely fit within the heat pipe maze of Asus' own Striker Extreme, especially if extra North Bridge and VRM fans are attached. The opposite works for the Zaward Sylphee - it feels comparatively small, with the two side fans dominating the device. My photos show its both sides on the Asus board.

< Both heat sinks are certified for CPUs in up to 130 W TDP envelope, which corresponds to dual-core 3.73 GHz Pentium 965 Extreme Edition, or quad-core 2.66 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (plus about 10% extra power headroom). I went ahead to push them well beyond the declared limit, by using two test configurations: one the 4.27 GHz above mentioned Pentium 965 Extreme Edition, running at FSB1220 on MSI 975X board, and the other was, to our readers already well known, quad-core Intel X3220 (the Xeon version of QX6700) running at 3.33 GHz with FSB1667 on Asus Striker. In both cases, we're looking at about 150 to 160 W TDP, resulting in substantial heat.

The V-60 was run first time in January, on the 3.33 GHz quad-core Intel, and the system passed all the tests without a hitch, with Nvidia CPU temperature monitor never going above 55 C. Surprisingly, the recent run on the older Pentium 965 produced a slightly hotter CPU result, around 58 C in the midst of 3DMark CPU test (but this one was shown using an MSI utility on their 975X board). Knowing that both are done on the 65 nm process and looking at their benchmark results, it is interesting to note that, within a scope of just over a year, Intel achieved three times the performance per watt advance per CPU socket, and yet with slight heat output reduction.

Zaward Sylphee also managed to get everything done without heat-induced throttling or crashes, but the temperatures were a bit higher: 59 C on the quad-core, and 61 C on the old dual core. The temperature difference was a bit smaller in this case, maybe due to a slight change in the thermal paste amount. But in general, it still completed the run at some 20% above its declared maximum TDP.

In summary, aluminium still does it well, as these two heat sinks show. Yes, the fans are unusually done, and copper plates are still the ones facing the CPUs. But, the performance is excellent - more than I expected, in the case of V-60 it isn't far from the much heavier (both in grams and in $$) all-copper Zalman 9700. So, here's to the lighter load on your mainboard, and your wallet, too. µ

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