Remember the golden days when microprocessors did not require high performance coolers? The lower clock speeds and simpler architectures, at least for the most part, produced reasonable heat that could be dealt with by quiet stock coolers. Now, if we were to focus our attention on air-cooling for enthusiasts, designs for air coolers have also changed drastically over the years. Thankfully, as microprocessor clock speeds soared passed 1.00GHz to 2.00GHz and then to 3.00GHz (Intel only), cooling manufacturers such as Thermaltake, Cooler Master and Thermalright have kept up with market standards and necessary requirements. How were these changes tackled? Air coolers (heatsinks) started to gain more copper throughout their structure. We also saw heatpipes and stacked copper fin technologies being implemented into various high-end models, but soon after that everything just paused.

As the future progresses, the changes in microprocessors are inevitable. We need changes in order to move forward and evolve the computing experience; so therefore, halting the progress because of the limits of air-cooling is not feasible. For now, let’s only focus on stock cooling. Intel and AMD both had to revise their stock cooling methodologies due to the amount of heat produced by their products. They have usually stayed with aluminum and frankly, aluminum worked just fine for systems operating at their stock speeds. However, the scenario is completely different with enthusiast cooling methods.

As stated earlier, cooling manufacturers have done their best to produce what they thought would work well in the future. And in AMD’s case, things are still going just fine. Intel, on the other hand, is in trouble. That’s not to say that air-cooling isn’t sufficient for Intel’s Prescott wonders, but manufacturers had to add in more copper, fins and implement heatpipes in order to deal with the chip’s thermal issues. While enthusiasts are still getting impressive overclocking yields with air-cooling, it only makes us wonder about the future.

The fact that heatsinks are getting heavier and the prices are increasing unnecessarily is ridiculous. We can blame it either on Intel (we will use Intel throughout this column, as their microprocessors are power hungry, which results in higher heat throughput by the chips) or the cooling companies, but in reality we can put both Intel and cooling companies at fault here. Intel and cooling manufacturers can both be held responsible for this foreseeable caveat.

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