Dynatron DC1207BMX Copper Pentium4 Heatsink Review

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The flexibility of this heatsink comes from the fact that with the right mounting clips it can be used on either an Intel Pentium 4 or Xeon socket 603/4 processor. The unit we're testing is configured for the P4 platform, and actually there is no physical difference between the DC1207BMX and the DC1207BMX/X (Xeon-ready) other than the clip. In any case, the DC1207BMX is based on Dyantron's signature skived heatsink construction and should perform pretty well given our past experiences with this companies coolers.

Skiving is a process where by thin copper fins are drawn up to a height of 24mm from a flat plate of copper with a special cutting blade. The remains of that flat plate of copper all the fins are attached to go on to form the base of the actual heatsink which means the thermal properties should be very good.

The significance of this set up is that there is no thermal interface to be concerned with between the fins and baseplate. On other heatsinks where fins are bonded to a base, there may be solder, or thermal epoxy to factor into the equation.

The DC1207BMX is rather large socket 478 copper heatsink, with thicker copper fins than we are accustomed to typically seeing. The fin pitch is about 1.7mm. Since the heatsink makes use of a wire clip HSRM, the cooler ships with its own complete socket retention assembly.

Installation of the Dynatron DC1207BMX will be a bit more tricky than other m478 heatsinks since the motherboard will have to be removed to allow the wire-clip HSRM that comes with this cooler to be installed.

	Heatsink Specsheet: Model: DC1207BMX HS Material: skived copper C1020 Fan: 4300RPM, 12V, 34.3 CFM, 0.395A Fan Dim: 15x70x70mm FHS Dimensions: 47x75x89mm Weight: 500 grams Made by: Dynatron Sold By: www.dynatron-corp.com

As you can see in pictures below, the Dynatron DC1207BMX uses a fairly standard wire-clip HSRM which I believe was originally slated for the socket 423 Pentium4. This is not the type of socket shipped with socket 478 motherboards, but as the mounting points are identical they are fully interchangeable.

The Xeon processor HSRM has screw holes which are more closely spaced, and hence if this cooler were being used for that application another retention mechanism would be required (see left image).

Pentium 4 mounting system	Xeon mounting system

Now let's take a closer look at the Dynatron DC1207BMX and see how it performs on the test platform.