News Scythe unveils Ashura cooler with 140 Hayabusa fan

With so many CPU HS being large tower designs (at least top end air) is there anything more designers can do to get better cooling on air ?
There seems to be very little innovation now days in CPU HS

 

I think they've gotten as good as they can for a reasonable cost. It's a bit like convergent evolution where everyone starts off with different, individual idea, but they all end up at almost the same place after a few cycles of optimisation.

I guess there aren't enough people prepared to pay significantly more for air cooling. I'd like to see what the manufacturers could do if they could charge what a good water cooling system costs. What could they do for $200+ I wonder.

Most of the change these days seems to be fiddling about with fan blade shapes, notches, slots,....

I agree, it's getting boring!

 

Cue the stretch Hyabusa jokes!

 

The only reasonable improvement they could make to an air-cooled setup would be to use silver fins rather than aluminum. Silver is at least 50% higher in terms of thermal conductivity than aluminum, so yes, air-cooling could be made much more efficient within existing architectures, but obviously at a higher cost. I'd easily pay double for a silver finned air-cooled setup if I saw a 50% improvement in cooling efficiency over aluminum...

 

or copper... why would any company use a precious metal when they could use copper which is vastly cheaper and has nearly the same thermal conductivity. Silver is typically traded at about $32 USD/troy ounce and copper costs about $4 USD/lb

 

Carve the hole HS from the worlds biggest diamond....

 

Well full copper heat sinks do exist, just look at the Thermalright True Copper for example. One major issue though is that copper is much denser than aluminium (8.97gcm^-3 vs 2.70gcm^-3) which leads to incredibly heavy heat sinks that are often simple too impractical to use. Certainly I don't think I'd want to strap on 2KG+ of metal onto my motherboard and CPU without a hefty amount of reinforcement.

Also a major bottleneck is simply air itself, changing the heat sink material honestly wouldn't make that much of a difference. What would make a bigger difference would be the quantity of air passing through, thus being able to remove as much heat as possible. Water cooling works so well mostly because you can have giant radiators that maximise the surface area available, leading to much more cool air being available in comparison to a standard heat sink.

 

I bought Thermalright True Copper second hand from ebay it weighs a ton. I think I can sell it for scrap and make a fortune.

 

Agree. More, thinner, copper fins with more airflow/pressure drop across the stack. Ultimately it's the air that has to carry the heat away, so the more air you can move and the greater the surface area, the more heat you can shift. = More $$