Comdex 2002 - New Meaning To The 'Cold Show'

Glacial, AVC & Auras

Drifting through the Taiwan section of the convention floor, we bumped into the cooling giant GlacialTech. We got a peak at several of their new HSF including the Diamond 4100, which boasts the impressive statistic as being one of the first 24K gold plated HSF combos on the market. Another cool product they demonstrated was the Igloo 4310 Pro HSF which had a thermal performance rating of 0.27C/W. Both of these combos weighed in a little over 380g.

Further down the Taiwan aisle, we ran into the cooling manufacturer Auras. Not a very large HSF company, Auras primarily deals as an OEM channel for desktop heatsink solutions. Rather than using a copper insert in their newest HSF, the “Cool Bird” uses a 25mm wide copper tube which acts as a massive heat pipe. The Cool Bird boasts an impressive Rc-a of 0.26C/W but unfortunately operates at 4900RPM @ 38.9dBA.

One of the more exciting HSF combos on the floor was AVC’s new unit, the Sunflower. As a joint venture with Intel and AVC, the Sunflower looks most like an Orb heatsink with a large winghead fan on top. Unfortunately, specifications seemed to be nonexistent on the floor, but we were told the Sunflower was capable of 36CFM of airflow. Certainly impressive, but if the Sunflower runs at 40dBA it will probably not become a very mainstream HSF combo.