Sparkle sputters diamonds on heatsinks
SPARKLE HAS AN interesting technology that it is rolling out - diamond coatings on its heatsinks. No, this isn't a bling-bling thing, diamond conducts heat really well, and that is the point of a heatsink.
Sparkle diamond like coated heatsink
The idea is simple, if you coat your heatsink with something that moves heat really well, it will cool better. With a process they call Diamonds Sputtering Technology, basically chemical vapor deposition (CVD), the heatsink is coated in a thin, hard barrier that moves heat right along. Diamond is also impervious to most solvents and moisture, so the DLC protects your shiny heat sink as well. It may not be worth much, carbon is cheap, but application is tricky, and it tends to be expensive to do in the end.
Sparkle is claiming that the coating will lower the temp of a 9500GT by 5 degrees, but they won't go as far as to say that it will keep the bumps from cracking. In any case, the simple fact that they are showing it on a 9500 heatsink means that Sparkle has gotten the price down quite a bit. If it works out well in volume production, you will probably see a lot of others doing it as too. Most importantly, you can shock and awe your science-averse friends with a low-end GPU, not through l33t frame rates, but just with the heatsink. Cool. µ
Note
There is not a single sparkling diamond pun in this article. For those of you who said we can't be serious and grow up, nya nya.
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It was about time they started using diamond in heatsinks, given its thermal conductivity is 3 to 6 times higher than copper's.
Too bad Charlie couldn't help himself from an nVidia rant. :)
Protects from what? Rust??
john: Do not assume that DLC (a black, amorphous carbon deposit) has the same thermal conductivity as crystalline diamond.
So the heat travels just as slowly as it always did through the metal bulk of the heat-sink, only to zip across those last few atoms of thickness in the coating? I find this to be a dubious move on their part. Besides, DLC are used mainly for friction reduction from what I have seen.
"For those of you who said we can't be serious and grow up, nya nya."
The only thing your serious at is creating unnecessary spin towards Nvidia congratulations Charlie you fail at life. Quite crying over spilled milk you bias scum sucker and go back to the bottom of the fish tank.
is to get AMD and Intel to coat the CPU with this material...
Diamond coating, nice for those who like to chrome their car engines.
I just bought a 9800GTX+ on Saturday. It's the best performance at the price, and my mobo is an SLI so I'm in the NVidia camp if I want to get dual cards in the future.
3 times the 9800GTX+ has given all screen artifacts, little blue horizontal lines approx 3mm high and 20mm wide. The pc becomes unresponsive within approx 5 seconds of this happening.
Googling has revealed many many posts in forums with other people having the same problems. This is what's worrying me.
Lots of guessing that maybe it's driver, bad windows installs, psu's with not enough power and all the other guesses that come from forum help ;-) It's none of these for me. I've only had 1 Nvidia 7600GT card in this mobo, it's a tidy install of windows with no Google/Yahoo toolbars or junk.
PSU etc are all well capable.
Anyway, is it a driver or is it hardware? The 9800GTX+ is a 55nm die shrink from the 9800GTX original 65nm. It's running at faster clocks as a result. Mine is at standard clocks, and I've no need to overclock it because it's fast.
I'm delighted with the performance but concerned that it's a flaky card. Is there a "memtest" for graphics cards? Something that will tell me for sure if the card is hardware failing?
@congrats
.. but he's better at spelling and grammar than you.
If DLC was properly applied, with mostly sp3 bonding and very little sp2 bonds or hydrogen in the mix, then it might be possible to make the heatsink physically smaller, as the enhanced heat conduction rate would flow heat away from the CPU contacting layer to the bulk air layer faster.
But, the entire external surface would need to be covered, particularly the CPU contacting layer.
DLC would be more beneficial in internal combustion engines to reduce piston friction.
Let's translate this story for the engineering challenged among us.
Joe: Sheesh, I wish I had more daylight in my room. But my windows are so dirty I barely see the sun. What can I do?
Salesman: ???
Joe: I thought about cleaning them, but that is so uncool...
Salesman: Then I have just what you need! Buy this ultratransparent, supercool, carbon-based polyethylene foil and paste it right over your window. It will double the transparency of the glass instantly!
Joe: Hm, does it really work?
Salesman: Sure!
Joe: OK.
Salesman: And the best part: Today it's only $399,- Satisfaction guaranteed or no money back!
Joe: Alright, give me two of them!
The end of another round of PR BS