The Cooler Master HHC-001
Cooler Master is not new in the cooling industry. In fact, it is one of the most well known brands when it comes to producing quality heatsinks. They have already produced quite a number of heatsinks for both AMD and Intel chips. However they are not known for producing heatsinks for extreme cooling. Recently they have started concentrating on coming up with high performance coolers for a market already saturated with countless number of heatsink manufacturers. So to compete in this market, they decided to come up with a totally different heatsink. Thus, the birth of their very first heatpipe cooler, the CH5-5K12. The what? The CH5-5K12, which you've probably never even heard of. Their first attempt at the heatpipe didn't do that well, so they have come up with yet another heatpipe cooler, the HHC-001, targetted for the AMD high performance heatsink market.
The HHC-001 is the product of thousands of hours of work by Cooler Master's R&D engineers. It is made of pure copper fins plus dual heat pipes to cool even the hottest AMD chip. But how does it work? How does the heatpipe really work and how is it different?
The Heat Pipe Principle
According to Threlfall "A heat pipe is actually something that's been around for quite some time. Water for instance at atmospheric pressure will boil at 100C. If you were to put the water into a sealed box and create a vacuum in that, the boiling point would actually be a lot less. And that's basically what a heat pipe is, and it takes the resultant vapour and that is attracted to the coldest spot where it condenses back into water. What that results in is, the heat from the liquid when it's boiled is transferred to the area where it condenses back into a liquid, so you get a transfer of the heat and this is what the heat pipe principle is all about."
Layout
The Cooler Master HHC-001 comes in a clear plastic case. The first thing you notice when looking at the packaging is the large phrase "#1 Choice For Overclocking". It also has the label Heat Pipe marked at the bottom of the case. The back of case details the heatpipe's specifications and installation instructions. Inside you can clearly see the heatpipe cooler together with some silica gel and some thermal compound. Overall, a very elegant packaging from Cooler Master.
The Dual Heat Pipe can be easily seen protruding from the base of the heatsink then curves up to the top through the copper fins. It is made of copper and is cooled directly by the fan blowing air on it. The liquid used inside the heat pipe is not known and wasn't disclosed to us by Cooler Master.
Now the next thing that really struck me as being different was the mechanism for attaching the heatsink to the socket. As you can see from the pictures, there is a rather large clip for your thumb that swivels slightly when you move it, allowing you to easily attach the heatsink. I was really lloking forward to using this, as I've had some bad experiences in the past (a Volcano 7 actually made me bleed) and I always have in the back of my mind that slight fear of crushing the core.
The copper fins (all 32 of them) are soldered to the large copper base. While being a large chunk of copper, it's not nearly as heavy as the Volcano 7+ I tested this against, and while I would be careful carrying my case around to any LAN I went to, I wouldn't be afraid of anything breaking off, even though it only attaches itself to the middle tab. Looking at the base you can see it comes with a nice, shiny flat finish. I used a couple of steel rulers to see if there was any sort of curve to the surface, but it seems completely flat to me. A small amount of lapping might appeal to some of you, but I really don't feel that this is all that necessary.
The fan is of the 60*25mm dual ball 6800rpm variety, and pushes a respectable 36.11cfm of air. As is usual with this sort of fan, it is LOUD, but no louder than that of the Volcano 7+. If anything (and without any decent sound measuring tools) it is ever so slightly quieter, but with a slightly higher pitch.
