Originally posted by: mikeford
Read this and weep if you have already paid.
http://www.ocia.net/articles/guzzler/guzzler.shtml
The guy that did the positive review cited in the OP must have got a good one. It measures up with a very good one in that article. Or is this a case of outright fraud where they sent the reviewer a working one, knowing the normal production were fakes?
Judging by the filing of the base, it is copper colored only, not copper. So I examined the box pics (from the article referenced in the OP). Nowhere on the box does it claim the base is anything specific. Not copper. Not aluminum. Not anything.
The tubes of the heat pipes (if they are functional heat pipes) they cut open do look like copper. It does say on the box that they are heat pipes. "Poweful Heat Pipe for Over Clocking"
But I don't know about the contention that the tubes can't be heat pipes because they supposedly didn't have anything in them. Would a real heat pipe have much noticeable in it? Did they cut open a known good heat pipe to compare with? My understanding is that there is very little liquid in them, possibly none you would notice if you broke one open. It seems to me, people did this back when heat pipes were first appearing, as a short, thick tube up the middle of a fairly normal looking heatsink, and they found just traces of something "waxy", from which they concluded (incorrectly) that the tube did nothing; it was a mere gimic, they said.
Here's the little bit of knowledge I picked up over the years. The liquid in heat pipes is usually water, not something exotic. The water picks up heat as it changes phase to a gas, which spreads the heat throughout the tube very rapidly, due to being a rarified gas. But wouldn't the temp of the CPU have to get over 100C for this to work, you say? Doesn't water have to get to 100C to boil, you say? No. 100C is only boiling at normal atmospheric pressure. They say water is a gas at zero pressure, and down to near absolute zero I suppose. For heat pipes, they evacuate the tube to a complete vacuum, and put in just enough water so that the pressure that develops inside as it turns to a gas is still low enough to keep almost all the water as a thin gas. Otherwise all you would have is a tube with a little water in it that wouldn't do anything beyond what a plain tube would do. The tubes interior is supposed to wick water to spread it back to wherever it is hot to complete the cycle. (Heating drives up the pressure, so some of the water will condense even when the heatpipe gets hotter.) If you open up the tube, the gas mixes in the air, and there are just traces of wetness on the interior of the tubes.
In other words, what the guy did to prove the heat pipes were fakes, doesn't actually show anything. OTOH the heatsink did perform very badly for him. Maybe it was that the base was so uneven. Or maybe the guy put too little heat gooey on it, considering the uneven base. Even supposed pros sometimes get the heatsink slightly tilted on the step of socket A; you can't see it. Or maybe the heat pipes are defective. Or maybe they are fakes.
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