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Eumax EU-0702 Copper Heat SinkProvided by: Eumax
My first piece of advice to these people is to buy a more competent heatsink. Then of course they ask me “which one?” That can be a very difficult question to answer, heat sinks seem to be blobbed into a couple of hard to discern categories. On one hand there are really expensive heatsinks for the overclocker, they work well but come at a cost. On the other you often have cheaper heatsinks that perform, well, cheaply. Upgrading your stock heatsink to one of these cheaper products all too often doesn't justify the purchase price. This is because these "cheap" models don’t perform much better than stock. A good example of a cheap heatsink that isn’t much better than stock is the Volcano 5. I chose to compare this heatsink to the Volcano 5 because I believe
that the cost of the Eumax unit it is really competing with some
of the midlevel heatsinks available. As an added bonus this cooler
comes with a custom fan with a red, green and blue LED embedded
in clear plastic. Not only does the Eumax unit promise performance,
but it entices with good looks as well. Let’s take a closer
look at the Eumax EU-0702. Specs (as listed on the Eumax Website) Main Feature:
Packaging The Eumax EU-0702 comes packaged in one of the best plastic packages that I have seen a cooler arrive in. Its plastic housing appears to keep the unit completely isolated in a rigid safety bubble. Upon opening the package I came across a small syringe of thermal grease accompanied by the Heatsink-fan unit. Its individual specs were listed as: Thermal conductivity >4.5W/m-k and Thermal resistance >0.06 C -in ^2/W
Rather than trust this grease I chose to use Arctic Silver 3 as I always do. The difference between the two greases, or any for that matter, is merely a few degrees Celsius. It is that small difference that I always pay attention to, and as a result I chose to give this heatsink a ride on the Arctic Silver 3 icicle. When I compared the consistencies of the greases I found that they looked nearly identical. The heatsink itself has a nice 80mm LED fan mounted atop a mountain of aluminum. The fins were aluminum, and there was a small copper insert at the base. The copper insert was roughly the size of a quarter and covered the area where the die would make contact with the base surface of the heatsink. In this critical area there was a thin layer of “protective” plastic. But let us be honest, anything that is dense enough to scratch copper is going to be dense enough to cut through that tab. Thankfully the heatsink was packaged nicely, and no oils were embedded in the copper insert covered by the plastic tab.
I peeled back the copper base to rub in some Arctic Silver 3 and took some time to observe the finish. There was some “arcing” present. Presumably this is from the sanding wheel or whatever device was used to ground the base of the Eumax heatsink. The base appeared to be level, with no convex or concaves angles; however, the surface left something to be desired. The grinding left scratches deep enough to show up in photographs, so surely it is enough distance to effect cooling on the microscopic level. I always like to see a nice mirror shine, but that is rare and we will have to see how this heatsink performs despite the slightly unsavory finish on the base. (It was difficult to portray the arrangement of the machining marks in the following photographs but there was a general semi-circle shape to the grooves.)
A big plus that this heatsink has is the clipping
mechanism. Many heatsinks include only a single clasp on either
side of the unit with which to clamp to the motherboard
socket. This heatsink delighted me with a 3 clasp per side design.
The reason I like this so much is the stability. It is easy to
break the plastic tabs on the CPU socket using high pressure heatsinks
which can render a motherboard useless by only breaking a single
tab.
The power cord connected to the fan was a 3-prong connector with a medium cord length. It proved to be enough to maneuver about my case. |
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