Processor heatsink: How is their cooling efficiency determined?

Question

Most heatsinks over processor chips that I have seen in the processors are more or less different from one another in terms of size and build. Are there any classifications for these heatsinks? How is their cooling efficiency determined? Which type of heatsink for processors is best?

Answer 1

Arpith, I'm getting a little worried about the quality of your 'contributions' to this site since you joined two days ago - please take some time to look around the site to understand what we're about and what we're not - start by reading the FAQ.

This site's about professional system administration, we care about data integrity and service reliability above all other things. As such when we buy our servers it's with these objectives first and foremost.

To this end we stick to supported configurations unless there's a very good reason not to, this means we buy servers/systemboards that support the exact OSs we use and we then populate these with components supported by the OS and server/systemboard.

So the answer to your question is that unless you're into home-computing/over-clocking etc. (which is superuser.com's territory) we define what our application and load-characteristics are, then choose a production-quality OS to support that application. We then look at the OS and ensure our servers/systemboards support them, then we look at what CPUs are supported by the servers/systemboards - and then we buy the heatsink that's supported by the CPU that enables the heat-profile of the CPU to maintain the TDP of the server chassis. It's like a chain of decisions, does that make sense.

So, much like 99% of sysadmin topics, there's not a 'best', it depends what you want to achieve - but we like our kit supported and stable - which usually discounts any overclocking/water-cooling shenanigans in favour of tried and tested parts.