In the good old days an HSF was something you bought if you couldn't afford a water-cooling kit or phase-change system. And most HSFs weren't much more than a lump of crudely-shaped aluminium with an unpleasantly loud fan whooshing away on top.
These days, heatsink design is a complex business, as cooling performance has to be combined with good looks, a low-noise fan and a retention mechanism that will hold it securely to the CPU. These increased demands means the disparity between well-designed HSFs, and those that slice up your hands and damage your hearing is greater than ever. The underlying technology has changed too. The best example of this is the humble heatpipe, which only a few years ago was merely a twinkle in the eye of some R&D engineer in Taiwan. Heatpipes are now commonly found in almost all high-performance HSFs, apart from Swiftech's distinctive helicoid-shaped aluminium pin designs.
Even so, some of the temperatures we observed on our two heavily overclocked and overvolted test CPUs, an Athlon 64 FX-55 and a 3.6GHz Pentium 4e, were genuinely surprising. Out of the 19 Athlon 64 HSFs we tested, 11 succeeded in cooling the CPU over 10ûC lower than the reference AMD HSF; three of the nine LGA775 HSFs managed the same feat. A handful of HSFs even managed to cool the CPU close to 20ûC lower than the reference HSF, which is better than many water-cooling kits. The old adage that you need water cooling to build a quiet PC is also no longer true. Some of these latest-generation HSFs are fitted with such low-speed fans that you can barely hear them at all.
So if you do not fancy the risk of water cooling, or would prefer to spend your cash on other parts of your system, then one of these high-performance HSFs could well be the answer to your CPU's heat problems.
Athlon 64 HSFs
