Anticipating the Noctua R-ANC successor to NH-D14

[BonzaiDuck]

Well as far as heat sinks are concerned we are pretty close to the ambient air version to Moore's law. water may be the interim solution for overclocking.

but billions are being spent to resolve this issue, some solutions on the exotic side

http://www.margaretmorrisbooks.com/diamond_microcircuitry.html

research will eventually pan out on some path that makes sense

There are definitely limits, and the air-cooling advocates are seeing it with these new Haswells and the IB cores with the blob of muck between the IHS and die.

The reason I'm holding out in switching to liquid cooling is my experience with my i7-2600K in my 2011 project. I just finished plugging some holes for exhaust air with a minor ducting enhancement to the NH-D14. @ 4.7 Ghz ~1.36V LinX load, something like 140W to be dissipated and 77F room-ambient, my two-hour average of four-core averages is between 67 and 68C. If the D15 squeezes out another 10C over that and assuming I can work the same magic picking up a few C here and a few C there, I might buy the NOctua cooler. If not, saving my pennies for a decent water-cooling starter kit that I can expand and enhance.