How practical would a diamond heatsink be?

T

The_Wolf_Who_Cried_Boy

Newcomer
Diamond conducts heat five times better than copper and so in that regard would be an ideal heat sink material. Obviously, is would be impractial to grow single crystal diamond heatsinks (or hire very skilled and patient gem cutters to chisel each heatsink), but what about suspending diamond fragments within a copper alloy as a metal matrix composite?

Could anyone speculate on wether this would bring measurable gains, and be worth the additional costs?
 
Water is a very bad conductor. But it can store a lot of heat, and it is really cheap. As long as your goal is not to store, but to get rid of the heat, it doesn't really matter very much, as long as it does conduct heat reasonably well and there is enough air or water flow. Or any other medium that gets rid of the heat for you.

As air is a much, much worse conductor of heat than water, it needs a really large cooling surface, compared, to have the same effect. So, with diamond and a very good conducting medium, you could save on bulk, but you would pay many times the amount of money for it.
 
Yes liquid cooling gives superior performance to air, but it comes at a cost both financially and in complexity. I doubt it will ever leave it's current niche markets, it also has insurance rammifications last time I checked (a few years ago now).

Air cooling will always have a massive advantage from economies of scale and in that regard I was curious if anyone was aware of any research into diamond composite heatsinks (google was not much of a freind on this occasion), I posed the topic question here as more than most forums your blessed with a good dose of clued in people.
 
Industrial diamond appears to be available at about $25 per gram which is about 4 orders of magnitude more expensive than bulk copper. For a reasonable-size CPU heat sink with a near-solid-diamond base, you'lll likely be looking at prices of perhaps $1000-$3000, and I would presume that the effect of the diamond will be more or less proportional to the % of diamond in the heat sink.

Even if you managed to make a 100% solid diamond heat sink, I would estimate that the difference from an all-copper heat-sink would be roughly the same as the difference between the all-copper heat-sink and an all-aluminum heat sink, presuming same shape and size.
 
arjan de lumens said:
Industrial diamond appears to be available at about $25 per gram which is about 4 orders of magnitude more expensive than bulk copper. For a reasonable-size CPU heat sink with a near-solid-diamond base, you'lll likely be looking at prices of perhaps $1000-$3000, and I would presume that the effect of the diamond will be more or less proportional to the % of diamond in the heat sink.
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Fine diamond powder can be bought for around $US3 per gram,
http://www.diamondtech.com/products/categories/diamond_powder_price_list.html
which while currently too expensive would still be subject to economies of scale as it's markets grew and synthetic diamond manufacturing techniques improved.
I was toying with figures like 20% per volume of diamond, which for a 500 gram copper heatsink would equate to @40 grams. An order of magnitude drop in diamond price would make that workable, and I'm guess such a drop is possible as synthetic diamond manufacture is still an emerging industry.


arjan de lumens said:
Even if you managed to make a 100% solid diamond heat sink, I would estimate that the difference from an all-copper heat-sink would be roughly the same as the difference between the all-copper heat-sink and an all-aluminum heat sink, presuming same shape and size.
Click to expand...

Even if that is all the gain to be had, its still a gain.
 
Hm, don't heatpipes pretty much negate the need for uber heat conductivity through solid materials anyway since they're so superior in heat transportation? The base of the best heatpipe sinks isn't very big - or thick - making it out of silver instead of copper might be a slight improvement, and diamond would be even slighter for a much higher price. A good sink costs like 45-50 bucks already, nobody but the tinkerloons want to add too much to that.
 
Given the crap airflow in typical ATX cases such a heatsink would likely be wasted. You'd do much better sticking with a standard copper HS and fixing the issue of the temperature of the air that's blowing over the HS.
 
Of the two main companies in the world doing artificial diamonds, one of them is using it to finance their R&D into diamond materials for computing. This includes diamond CPU parts and heatsinks. One day, aritficial diamond heatsinks for a reasonable price might very well become financially viable.
 
Mmmm gas deposition diamond wafers :)

Pretty much the same (quite cheap) technique used to make diamond dust.

If you have a square of diamond wafer (eg cut from a bigish natural diamond) & deposit diamond on it, it gets a little wider for each layer you put down.
Every so often, chop the top, widest slice off & start again.

Slow to begin with but in a few years/decades they should be cranking out big panels of diamond wafer for cheap & always growing bigger.

Oh yeah, I believe gas deposition diamond transistors have been prototyped.
Seem to recall some kind of solidstate small diamond laser that could eventually enable computing with light too...
 
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