Installation

After taking a few snapshots, I set to work.  I removed the old OEM sink from my processor and proceeded to install the Heat Guzzler.  Well, it pretty much went downhill from there.  First of all, the cooler would not clear the capacitors on either side of the socket.  I fussed with it for a while, and made little progress.  I finally decided that with a little massaging, it should fit.  Before I headed out to the shop, I also noticed a small design flaw (the first of many, I might add).  The fan is attached to one side of the fins, with no possibility of being changed to the other side, or being reversed.  Why is this a problem?  Because the fan is set to push air through the fins from the side.  Only problem is that when installed in the socket it is trying to pull air from right in front of the exhaust fan on the back of my case.  So in other words, the CPU fan is directly opposite of the rear case fan, and there is no question in my mind that the small fan on the processor is going to lose that battle.  Not only that, but I firmly believe in the concept of a case-wide airflow pattern, and this thing was going to completely disrupt that flow, fighting against the flow of my rear exhaust fan.  Many cases will have this same issue, but it is a small concern compared to what I found next.

I took the Heat Guzzler to my lab, and proceeded to knock the corners off the copper base with my trusty Dremel.  I only had to remove a small amount to clear the caps on the motherboard, but I was astonished to see that the copper base wasn't really copper at all.  As you can see from the pictures (taken with my son's Intel Microscope) the so-called copper base is nothing more than aluminum with a copper plating on it.  Now, before anyone goes crying false advertising, nowhere on the packaging does it say that it has a copper base.  So legally, no problem.  But it is obvious to me that this is just a ploy to make people believe that the thing is copper. Note the shiny aluminum revealed when the corners were ground down.  The plating was basically flaking off.

Now I was starting to get suspicious.  I'm a die-hard cynic anyhow, so I started looking the thing over a little more carefully.  I should have realized that the thing was too light to be copper (is Archimedes out there anywhere?)  Generally speaking, if a manufacturer is going to cut corners, they will cut all the corners.  As I looked it over a little more, I started to notice more troubling features.  One, the supposed heat pipes that are to carry heat from the base to the fins are kind of scrawny, and they appear to be just glued or epoxied into the base.  I could be mistaken here, but heat transfer is majorly dependant on the surface and contact area.  The pipes barely touch the baseplate, and where they run up into the fins, they barely touch the edges of the fins as they go.  There just doesn't seem to be anywhere for the heat to travel. 

Testing

Well, the true test would be when I had it installed, so I continued to give the Heat Guzzler the benefit of the doubt. I finally managed to get it installed onto the processor.  Now, this was on an older motherboard with a puny Duron 750 installed, so I figured this would be an easy cooling task for the mighty Heat Guzzler.  It's advertised to cool even the hotter 3400+.  Well, since I was a little leery after my previous findings, I hit the DEL key on bootup and immediately went into the PCHealth screen of the BIOS to watch the temperatures. So I watched it go from 35 to 40.  I figured it would stabilize soon, since my OEM sink keeps it at around 41 or 42C most of the time. Nawp.  Kept right on climbing all the way up to about 62C before I finally turned it off.  Can you say thermal runaway? And the packaging clearly says "Powerful Heat Pipe for overclocking".  My cynicism reads this another way:  "Since you've already voided your warranty by overclocking, we won't be responsible for frying your processor", but maybe I've talked to too many tech support personnel over the years.