Gold Plating your heatsink

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.

 

maybe copper plating instead? 

 

I believe copper has higher thermal conductivity than gold.

 

Yup, copper has higher thermal conductivity than gold. I doubt that coating a heatsink in copper will do anything.

 

Or you could use Helium II which has a thermal conductivity a couple hundred times the conductivity of copper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_II#Helium_II_state

:D You will just have to get the heatsink down to ~-280C

Why not build one completely out of copper? I am sure that some people would be willing to pay the premium for it.

The price/performance ratio wouldn't be worth it.

After a certain point, Surface area is more important than material.

That's why most Blocks are made of copper, as are most heatpipes, but the fins themselves arent.

Proof of this concept is the Dark Knight 2.

Its basically a Hyper 212 evo, with a special coating. It increases its performance dramatically.

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.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835106044

It doesn't look that great, regardless. I much prefer the aluminum fins on their own, or even nickel plated, would look nice.

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.