Hi guys, i was wondering what your thoughts are on gold plating your heatsink to improve thermal conductivity and thus cooling performance.
now, im pretty sure this isnt very cost effective and since most heatsinks have a high surface area it would take alot of gold. what im purposing is to just plate half the fins so you can have the advantage of aluminum's rapid heat dissaption, but lower thermal conductivity compenstated by gold's higher thermal conductivy, but slow thermal dissapation.
thinking aobut doing this just to see if it will do anything and also the bling factor lol.
if you want the absolute best solid thermal conductor then have your heat sink made out of synthetic diamonds, its both the best thermal conductor and doesn't conduct electricity
I would still love to see some sort of all copper heatsink. I think that with the higher thermal conductivity, the entire thing could be made lighter (so long as it still would have the required strength and rigidity and whatnot) and then for the same total weight, you could get more surface area. I think that it might work better overall to rethink the entire design with the use of just copper in mind. Mind you that heatsinks aren't going to be much more than a few pounds, and copper is ~$3.50 per pound, so the increase in price wouldn't be all that much, I wouldn't imagine.
Not too long ago, 8-10 years ago, there were loads of companies making fully copper air towers for CPUs. The reason why you don't see that anymore is the price of copper sheet for fins, die formed copper tubes, and solid copper blocks for the heatsink base completely shot up in price around 2004-2005 with the advent of the second Iraqi war as copper supplies worldwide were starting to be pulled for use in bullets for the USA's 10+ year "War on Terrorism" in the middle east. I can confidently make this assertion because I've had to deal with the idiotic views people have on "terrorism" here in America the last 13 years of my life. It's the best explination I can come up with that is within reason for why heatsink manufacturers don't want to make large copper tower coolers anymore. It's just not profitable from a materials standpoint.
Here is an example that's only maybe 6-8 years old. Was sold around the time LGA775 was still around in large quantities.
graphene. used as a composite with copper, it provides about 25% better cooling (talking in degrees here) and it's cheaper. I'm sure the same could be done with aluminium/nickel heat sinks.