very strange and even unknown effect happened
 

I give you fair readers a dilemma, what happened?

Look at poster mjs1231 and analyize his results, speculate, hypothesize...

http://www.houseofhelp.com/v3/showth...250#post157250

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...8&page=2&pp=25

Thank you for your support

Please look towards the end of the posts in the current links

Interesting that he can see the bottom of the heatsink and liquid come out of it when it is sitting on a burner.

For clarification, the zalman 7000cu was upsidedown, on the burner, with cpu contact area facing up.

Pictures? Video? Proof?

We all know that the contact surface is not perfectly flat, microscopically.

I can imagine some residue left from whatever process was used to manufacture heatsink/waterblock interfering with performance.

Bill recomends cleaning between test runs using xylene.

Otherwise, this fellow appears to have used a good thermal paste, and we (here) all know how much of an impact the TIM joint has.


Possible.

Copper will also "absorb" things. One of the problems with casting copper blocks as they can leak. I belive TIM will absorb into the copper a little. But will that turn into a clear liquid and then smoke? Easy experiement if someone has a heatsink laying about. I think I got some somewhere will look into it a bit later.

Most metals are slightly porus.

If its a copper h/s, melting solder into the base would fix it, and the exess would come off easly when lapped. I used solder like this to seal some porus braizing on a leaking barb on one of my blocks . Would have been better if I could braize properly though...

In many industry using sintered metal products, they are "infiltrated" after with a copper alloy to seal it. Requires furnace with inert gas atmosphere to use anything other than soft solder though....

Dont know what filling the porus holes would do to performance though. I think it would be a small improvement, but noticable? probably not.