Modern electronics pack an incredible amount of complexity into a very small
space which creates a lot of heat. Heat that if left unchecked could reduce the
lifespan or even destroy outright the
processor that created it. That's why when you first open up a PC or other
electronic device, one of the first things you'll see is one or more large
metal objects called heat sinks. Inside a PC, heat sinks will be found on the
CPU, graphics card, motherboard, inside the power supply, and even in other
places as needed. As you can see, they can look very different from each other,
but they all serve the same basic purpose, to remove heat from delicate
components and extend their lifetimes. Let's walk through some of the different
kinds of heat sinks you might encounter. First up is the heat spreader. This is
the most basic heat sink, and it consists of a simple flat piece of
metal. It only moderately improves heat dissipation. Because while metal will
transfer heat to the surrounding air faster than plastic, it would be much
more effective if it also increased the size of the area of the surface that's
being used to transfer that heat. That leads us to our next common type,
passive pinned or finned heat sinks. These are basically heat spreaders with
structures on top of them that dramatically increase the surface area
that can be used to dissipate heat to the surrounding air. They are much more
effective than heat spreaders, but they are also more expensive to make and they
take up more space. Speaking of taking up space, adding a fan to blow air
directly at a thinned or pinned heat sink is relatively inexpensive and very
space efficient as a means of dramatically improving heatsink
performance. For this reason, actively cooled thinned heat sinks are one of the
most common types of heat sinks found in PC systems where size and cost are major
design factors. Speaking of cost, the most effective and the most expensive
common type of heat sink in a PC is a heat pipe or vapor chamber heatsink. For
very hot components like CPUs or graphics cards, the limiting factor of a
standard thinned heat sink's performance is no longer the speed at which the fins
can be used to dissipate heat to the air, but rather the speed at which the
heat can be moved away from the very small processor core to the fins in the
first place. Heat pipes and vapor chambers usually consist of an outer
copper wall and a material inside that is constantly changing phases between
liquid and gas. They can be used to carry heat away from a small heat source
extremely quickly to a large array of heatsink fins where it can be dissipated
to the air. So far, I've talked mostly about surface area and how that helps,
but there are other factors that affect heatsink performance. For example,
copper performs better than aluminum as a heatsink material. And among aluminum
alloys, some of them are better than others. But the material selection, like
many of these other factors, cannot be controlled by anyone other than the
manufacturer. So might not be that useful to you. But what can you do to
improve your heatsink's performance? Number one is to lower the ambient
temperature. If cracking open a window lowers the room temperature by 5°, it
will lower your heat sink temperature by about 5°. Number two is more air flow.
The faster the air moves over the heatsink, the better it will perform.
Number three is better thermal interface material. No two pieces of metal will
ever meet up perfectly, and thermal interface materials fill in these micro
gaps for better heat conduction or better heat transfer between them.
Replacing the subpar solutions that come pre-installed on your components with
high performance aftermarket thermal compound can easily lower temperatures
by several degrees or more. Number four is mounting. A good solid mount improves
the contact between a chip and a heatsink and ensures effective thermal
transfer. Often a heatsink that isn't performing as expected is being held
back by an air bubble trapped in between or a small component nearby that is
interfering with the heatsink's mounting pressure. Speaking of mounting pressure,
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