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COPPER HEAT SINKS

This review will cover three of the newer copper heat sinks out on the market today. New copper heat sink line offers exceptional thermal solutions for electronic devices. Which material is better for heat sinks, copper or aluminum?

"Copper heat sinks" have every advantage over aluminum except weight and machineabiliy. Contrary to popular belief, copper is better at both drawing in and releasing heat sinks. Copper heat sinks can also easily hold more heat then aluminum, but this does not affect its ability to release the heat it is holding. The design of a copper heat sink is more important then the material.

Some people think that many heat sinks are designed with a copper base and aluminum fins because copper draws heat better and aluminum releases it better. Liquid cooled copper heat sink are designed in this way to reduce cost, ease manufacturing, and reduce weight. From a manufacturing standpoint aluminum is a much easier metal to work with than copper heat sink.
Copper has integrated itself into the world of heatsinks over the last year while Aluminum heatsinks have quietly taken a step out the back door. Some of the earlier "distributor copper heatsinks" models released have included circular copper plates inserted into the base, and there have been entire copper bases with Aluminum fins. Nowadays, the complete Copper heatsink is really the only way to fly if you are serious about your electronic cooling.

Instead of the usual square slab of metal with fins sprouting out of it, copper heat sinks have a base with a triangular-prism cross-section. The fins are bonded to the sides of the prism, the retaining clip runs through a slot cut in the middle, and the result is a copper heat sink with fins from top to bottom.

Because the copper heat sinks flare out from a relatively small base, clearance problems should be pretty rare. To make the dual-fuel mounting system work, each of these copper heat sinks comes with an impressive heap of hardware. This is the reason why a copper coated or insert on a coper heat sink's base
doesn't work as well as an all-copper heat sink. In theory, a copper coated alluminum heat sink should be able to aborb heat just as fast as an all-copper heat sink and at the sametime, dissipates faster.

For applications that feature extreme cooling requirements, the use of copper heat sinks or fan sinks may be required. In terms of air intake, copper heat sinks with omnidirectional structures are considered efficient, allowing airflow from all possible directions to penetrate into the pin array. Once the air enters the pin-fin array, the more turbulence created, the more efficient the copper heat sink will be.

Thus, through the use of highly conductive aluminum alloys or copper, the performance of a copper heat sink can be significantly improved. As a result, the surface area is not exposed to sufficient moving air, and although dense copper heat sinks offer larger surface areas, they are less efficient than low-density heat sinks in low-airflow environments.

The use of copper heat sinks may provide the required performance premium in such occurrences. Since copper is substantially more conductive than aluminum, copper heat sinks offer a performance premium of twenty percents over identical structured aluminum versions. At the same time, because of their ability to spread heat quickly over their base, copper heat sinks will prevent the development of spots at the junction of the device.

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