Just sorta popped into my head: Heat is not unidirectional, and presumably the backside of the socket gets quite warm as well. I wonder if itd make any sort of difference if one were to stick a heatsink on the back directly behind the cpu. Obviously there isn't enough space to put anything in a normal case unless one removed the side panel and had a mounting cutout in their case. This mightn't need be a full tower or water cooler, maybe just one of those tiny ones you used to be able to get at radioshack? And some sort of nonconductive thermal glue.... Actually a gpu would be easier since the sink could just rest on top and get loads of airflow in a 'normal' build. Sounds like something the Tek could try with a really old card just for kicks. It might work?
The heat sink on a CPU has direct contact to the chip. making for good heat transfer. A heat sink on the back have to pull heat through the small pins on the socket or BGA array and wont help much. I have tried this on a Ge force 295 and there was no improvement.
Problem is the heat is coming from inside the cpu.
Top side is exposed and that's where the cooler is now. Direct contact.
Bottom side has tons of pins into a socket on a motherboard. Add all them up and not much heat can pass through all the way to the back of the motherboard. A lot of insulating material in the way.
Path of least resistance is to make the cooler on the top better.
hi ,Scythe SY1225SL12SH 120mm "Slipstream" Case Fan blowing on the back of cpu socket if your case has cutout in motherboard tray/panel for cpu backplate. If not you can always make one with dremel .You can try strapping one there, only 12 mm thick so there shoud be some room betwin motherboard panel and side panel, if your case has some vents on the other side. But they are loud :) Ive tried it when i was using aircooling.
There are people that place an 80mm fan on the back of their sockets to help with the socket CPU temperature of a CPU. A surprising amount of people do this when trying to obtain 5ghz with the FX-8-core series.
Placing a heatsink would be doable. You could use some of Arctic Cooling's new heatpads, but you might need a decent sized, or very efficient, heatsink to make a difference. Perhaps you could use one of AMD's stock heatsinks, so that you have active cooling to ensure a difference would be made?
As for having a heatsink on top of the GPU, Arctic Cooling does this with their Accelero Xtreme III and IV. (And a couple other current generation products.) I haven't seen any conclusion 3rd party FLIR data to see how much it actually works, but, it exists.
EDIT - good thinking, though. More ideas like this need to be put into play.
Well, the idea came from thinking about building a cylindrical case with two 280mm fans on either side. The motherboard would be placed edgewise so there would be plenty of airflow on either side. Extra heat sink(s) on the back maybe just for better weight distribution. If I did my math right all the air in the case would be replaced in 1 second or less depending on the length of the tube.....
For cooling the chip itself this would not do much if anything at all, as others above have explained. But when you need to cool the actual socket itself, it would make sense. For example, AMD 8-core chips can really heat up their sockets when you stress test your overclocks, which can lead to throttling. I don't know about heatsinks, but putting a fan on the back of the socket helps that quite a bit and brings your socket temp closer to your core temp. But again, for the actual chip itself, probably makes no difference. You can try though, that never hurts. Unless you do something horribly wrong lol.