ARCTIC launches Alpine 11 Passive cooler for Intel systems

[HEXUS]

Supports LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156 processors with up to 47W TDP.

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[Sunderas]

These are probably made in China and are you telling me it costs more to ship to EU than to the USA? 14.05$ for EU? 2.06$ difference doesn't sound like much but it amounts to roughly 17,2% difference. I don't believe there is such a difference in taxes between both markets, so what is with this pricing?!

[Nifl]

These are probably made in China and are you telling me it costs more to ship to EU than to the USA? 14.05$ for EU? 2.06$ difference doesn't sound like much but it amounts to roughly 17,2% difference. I don't believe there is such a difference in taxes between both markets, so what is with this pricing?!

Actually yes, the difference between taxes and no taxes is about 19 percent, so it seems to be cheaper in Europe. In the USA all the prices are without taxes, in Europe all the prices are with taxes.

[Plasmastorm]

Looks like someone found the old Athlon XP stock coolers and started shipping them sans fan.

[Razor Time]

Looks like it took 60 seconds to design.

[Luke7]

Slow news day, Hexus?

[Nifl]

Looks like it took 60 seconds to design.

And on top of that no copper on the bottom, so liquid metal thermal compound would destroy it.

[Xlucine]

Ooh, I like it - it's very neat. You can get a 3.9GHz quad core xeon that only takes 45w (E3-1260L v5), so this combined with a graphics card that turns off the fans under light load could be a very nice system. You could go down to just 25w at 3.2GHz (E3-1240L v5) if you were worried about sustained turbo boost speeds dropping in a hot case

[abaxas]

Finally someone has actually thought about physics when designing a heatsink Just like the big companies do.

If anything I think there should ban fans on cpu heatsinks and actually start to build pcs with proper thermals. But that's 'enthusiast' kit for you, looks like a dogs dinner and usually is designed for bling before performance.

[Xlucine]

This is more a function of accounting than physics - extruded aluminium is super cheap to make fins with, which is why everyone's been making every motherboard heatsink ever in the same fashion as this. Heatpipes and copper are still very good ways to move heat, and forced air over stamped fins is still a good way to shed it.

[lumireleon]

I am a BIG FAN FUN boy

[spolsh]

Would like to see a review of this please, Hexus. See how bad the throttling is, or if it works well in a case with decent airflow. At least it doesn't look like it'll foul RAM slots or anything.

Seems like it could be a nice cheap way to cool a living room PC.

[this_is_gav]

The problem with passive coolers is that you eventually need a way of shifting that heat from the area around the heatsink as the heat will just continue to build and build, which in most cases means a fan anyway. In a large case that's likely to be less of an issue if the heat has a means of escaping upwards, but in a smaller form factor, which I'm guessing is roughly where this is aimed (HTPC for example) they can be quite cramped and restrictive.

For a decent system you're probably still better with a motherboard which can automatically regulate fan speeds as well as the user being able to override them (the ASUS boards are fantastic for this, and probably Gigabyte and MSI good too). When idling the loudest thing in my Fractal R5 is the 5400rpm hard drive, despite having an overclocked 4790K @ 4.4GHz and a GTX 970. Even when gaming on automatic settings you can barely hear anything anyway, unless you manually turn the fans up.

[Michael H]

When you need a case cooling fan to provide adequete airflow for the cooler to operate it's essentially pointless unless it means being able to use a larger slower spinning fan and get more surface area from the heatsink in a confined space.

£10-20 can get you a basic heatpipe equipped tower cooler with a 92mm or 120mm fan - remove the fan and they will outperform this like-for-like, and with the fan equipped and only set to come on and higher temperatures they can extend the usable range far further without increasing noise.