A range of heatsinks produced by
Zalman technologies.
Flower heatsinks are composed of 30-40 thin sheets of
copper or
aluminium which are stacked on top of each other, and
bolted together at one end. The bolted end is machined to a mirror smoothness, while the other end is fanned, so that the heatsink resembles a
book with its spine down, or a
flower. The fan is held above the heatsink by a bracket that attaches to the
blanking plate screws. The heatsinks are sold as boxed sets, containing a Flower, fan, bracket, a device to slow the fan, and a syringe of
heat goo.
The big selling point for these heatsinks is their low noise output - Typically they are supplied with large,
slow moving fans (often larger than a case fan). With the speed set to minimum, they are
inaudible, drowned out by the
hard drives or
power supply. Even on full, they are still much quieter than equivalently performing conventional heatsinks.
The pure copper heatsinks are seriously
heavy, weighing more that
AMD and
intel's maximum allowed weight. If the case is jolted, it can rock back and forth, destroying the
processor, and if dropped, it is likely to snap off, damaging whatever it hits on the way down. Zalman warns customers to
detatch pure copper heatsinks before moving the computer. There are also copper/aluminium Flowers that are just under AMD's weight limit, and pure aluminium ones that are under
Intel's. For the truly hardcore, there's a
gold plated one...
A common problem in installing a Flower is that the
fan turns so slowly that the
motherboard thinks it's broken, and won't switch on. By connecting a regular heatsink to the fan connector, this test can be disabled in the
BIOS setup.