Intro

The onslaught of all copper coolers has been in effect for a little while now, however only recently, starting with Thermalright's SK-6, have manufacturers been using thin fins on their heatsinks, and soldering them to the base. Many of the first all copper coolers to hit the market had very large, thick fins, or pins, which could not dissipate heat as well as they should, thus they have now begun using thin fins to dissipate the heat quicker. Several manufacturers now have all copper coolers out, and many more have them in development. Today we will be taking a look at Vantec's first all copper offering, the CCK-6035D.

The Package

As you can see in the picture above, the CCK-6035D comes in the classic blue Vantec box. Included in the box are the heatsink, some white silicon heatsink paste, and a 3 to 4 pin connector. In today's tests I will not be using the included silicon thermal compound, but instead the highly renowned Arctic Silver II thermal paste. I will be using the included 3 to 4 pin adapter because I don't want to risk blowing out a header on my motherboard due to the large amount of current needed for the power-hungry Delta.

The Heatsink

As you can see in the first picture, the infamous Delta Black Label 6800 RPM fan is mounted on top of our heatsink. These fans are very well known for high CFM airflow, great cooling power, and of course, being LOUD! This fan requires .48 Amps (About 5.77 watts) of current to run on, so it is highly recommended that users with older motherboards use the 3 to 4 pin connector. Newer motherboards such as the Abit KT7A should be able to push enough power to the headers, so users may plug the fan into the motherboard. Moving on to the second picture, you can see the circular hole that is cut into the fan shroud and the fins. There are a total of 34 fins on the CCK-6035D, all inter-linked at the top, and then soldered to the thicker copper base. The fins are slightly less than 1mm apart from my measurements, and the gap that makes way for the clip is 6mm.

Next up, we have the clip. First off I must say that this clip is magnificent, and easy to work with. I'd go as far as saying you could teach a Chimpanzee to put this on, and it would do it perfectly. Once you have the back section of the clip hooked on to the center cleat, all you have to do is push the main section of the clip down, bend the hinge outwards, and lock it onto the cleat. Once you have done this, to finalize the installation, you simply push the clip back, and it locks itself into place. From my experiences, this is the first heatsink I have used that didn't involve any sort of tool, next to my thumb. The only thing I didn't care for about it was that in my opinion, it didn't seem to put enough pressure on the core to provide for adequate contact.

Now we'll move to the front and side views of the heatsink. At first glance, many believe that the shroud on the CCK-6035D is actually also made out of copper. The thing about that is, it isn't. The shroud is actually made out of Aluminum (AL 6063T5 ) and is anodized to look like it is indeed copper. This is most likely to cut down on manufacturing costs, and weight. If the shroud was indeed made of copper, I doubt it would aid in cooling at all. The shroud also runs parallel to the fins. This is obviously to create a tunnel of air to cool off the fins quicker. In the next photo you can see the fins are divided into 2 sections with the clip running down the middle. There are 17 fins per side, each being 32mm tall, and I guesstimate them to be between .1mm and .3mm in thickness.

Lastly, it's time to take a look at the bottom of the unit. In earlier reviews many sites noticed that the bottom was tarnished, and feared it would effect the cooling. The reason the bottoms on their units were tarnished is because they received pre-production samples. The units selling now have highly polished bottoms as you can see from the picture above, Auto Value anyone? Anyway, back to reality, as you can also see in the picture, there are a few minor scrapes and dents in the bottom. This is due to copper being a soft metal and is expected. Next to the minor defects the bottom is perfectly smooth.