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Introduction
For anyone into overclocking, as well as PC aficionados, the heat sink is the first place they look in order to keep their processor cooler. Over time we've seen hundreds of different coolers, and 99% of them so far have all been made out of aluminum. Which has worked VERY well so far. Aluminum is a good metal for cooling, its lighter, it transfers heat well, and is cheap. Sounds like you get all you want from aluminum, right?
Wrong.
Yes, aluminum is a good metal for it, for all the reasons I just mentioned. However, while it transfers heat well, it's NOT the best. In recent times, more manufactures have been looking to alternative metals for their coolers, most notably copper. Copper is a really nice metal for heatsinks, too. It offers better thermal conductivity than aluminum, which means that it can cool better, which is what we really want. However, it's got a couple of tiny pitfalls. One of them is that it's a LOT heavier than aluminum, so an identical cooler made from copper will be a LOT heavier than the aluminum, and its also somewhat more expensive. Vantec's newest heat sink hopes to combine the best of both worlds with their newest cooler the 6035D that is an Aluminum/Copper combo heat sink.
Packaging/Construction
Vantec uses virtually identical packaging for all their coolers now. All their heat sinks come packaged in a small blue box with the company logo on it, also adorning a small sticker with the model of the heat sink. Yeah, this is a plain and simple packaging, but it works, a heat sink doesn't need that much of a box! However, Vantec does throw a couple extra goodies into the mix for added touch. Inside the box with the cooler is a small blister pack of silicone thermal grease as well as a 3 to 4 pin power adapter for the fan, as the delta fan it includes has a really nasty habit of burning out motherboard headers. (In plain English: USE THE ADAPTER WITH IT!)
The 6035D has a construction type I hadn't seen before in a heat sink. It uses a copper base, with thin copper fins soldered in some fashion onto the base, much like a lot of other heat sinks do. However, rather than leave it at that, they put a large aluminum housing over the fins and base. This is a really unconventional thing to do, but it did accomplish some good things, with the biggest being protecting the delicate copper fins. Other advantages include, a stable and flat base to install the fan onto, rather than securing it between fins like so many other sinks do. This is a pretty good set of advantages there; however a possible downside I see is that it could possibly hurt the temperatures by preventing more airflow across the copper fins. On the other hand that's just speculation and not fact, so I'll say that's a bonus in construction for now. The
Design/Construction: 2/2
>> Installation
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