On Mar 14, 2009, at 2:38 AM, Ernest L. Gunerius wrote:
> It could be argued and possibly answered by experiment that there > could be a surface condition in the range between a very rough > finish and a finish that imposes a Casimir force that would give > the minimum thermal resistance at a reasonable cost of Time, Money > and Resources. > > I would imagine that the Engineers at the Heat sink, Thermal Paste, > Processor and Computer Manufacturers have thoroughly investigated > the situation. > > If they have followed good engineering practices they have > experimented and found a workable solution within the Triple > Constraint (Money, Resources, Time). > For the LGA 775 products from Intel, which present a very large surface area to the cooler, the most popular method of "extreme cooling" is "lapping" the processor and the cooler to flatness, followed by application of the best available heat transfer compound. The cooling surface of the processor is injection cast, and is not necessarily maximally flat, but it is certainly flat enough to transfer the rated heat to the supplied cooler under normal conditions, and improvements in the interface, and in the external cooling components can help significantly in the "extreme" cases. Liquid cooling is popular, and packaged solutions abound. Some motherboard manufactures. knowing that their customers will be liquid cooling the processors, offer motherboards with liquid cooling of the voltage regulator modules, the Northbridge, and even the Southbridge. Liquid-cooled RAM modules is less common, but are offered, too. For the BGA products from IBM and Freescale which are found on G4s, for example, a dramatically smaller surface is presented to the cooler, and the challenges are therefore greater. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
