CPUmate DIA-10500 Heatpipe Pentium 4 Heatsink Review
CPUMate Inc are an ISO9001 certified company based in Taiwan which
have been producing heatsinks since late 2001. As a new company
in a highly competitive market which is often "cut throat," innovation is the only way to survive, and
thrive.
Up until this point it has been evident that
CPUmate have not had much if any North American experience. With the results of
the DIA-1500 in hand it's safe to say that further advancements along this line
of design will bring greater exposure to this company.
The
cooling solution CPUmate base their heatsink around is nothing more than two interlocking nickel plated
extruded aluminum heatsinks which are inexpensive to produce, but
throw in a set of heatpipes and the
equation changes. While we have seen similar examples (sans heatpipes) from other Taiwanese
manufacturers which have proved disappointing, CPUmate have added the right technology in
the right way, endowing the DIA-10500 with some fairly good performance
characteristics.
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| In
this IcePAK rendering from CPUmate's website, we can see how heat moves throughout the entire system. |
Heatpipes
can be very useful additions to a heatsink
- enabling it to work harder under the same airflow parameters. Heatpipes
can also be ill designed for a particular heatsink and offer little or no
realistic benefit to the overall cooling capability. In this instance, CPUmate have
engineered a very simple and effective solution, that while not entirely quiet,
it does posses very good thermal properties for its size and
materials.
Essentially what we are seeing
is this; a single heatsink extrusion has been designed in such away
that placed fin-to-fin, the metal can be locked in place forming one
full heatsink. Now that is not to say that heat energy travels
'magically' from base of the bottom heatsink up along the side fins to the
top heatsink.The side fins are simply too thin (2mm thick), and the thermal
values too low for this to work to any significant degree.
The point
of doubling up the heatsinks is two-fold. First of all, with the twin heatpipes
joining the two aluminum extrusions heat energy is transferred via the heatpipes from
the base of the lower heatsink to the base of the upper heatsink
where it is dispersed to the surrounding fins. Secondly, by increasing surface
area in this fashion the overall pressure drop of the air as
it moves through the two sets of heatsinks is lower, enabling a smaller 15mm
x 70mm x 70mm fan to be used. There is no plenum here
so I think the design still needs a little more tweaking.
Along with the non-standard
sized heatsink comes a custom blue heatsink retention mechanism. The mounting
points are compatible with all Pentium 4 motherboards, and the length of the
HSRM is about the same as standard unit, but the width is much smaller. A
typical Pentium 4 heatsink is on the order of 70mm wide; the CPUmate is just
45mm.
To mount the CPUMate
DIA-10500, it is simply a matter of removing the stock Intel HSRM, and replacing
it with the custom HSRM included in the package.
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