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Originally Posted by maxSaleen
Strait Cu isn't cutting it anymore in the enthusiast market. Heatpipes are "must have" on high end air. Evolution is everywhere.
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There do appear to be a number of heatsinks, all Cu, which give most heat-pipe based heatsinks an extremely good run for their money. eg. Thermalright SLK-900, which happily outperforms the large majority of heat-pipe based heatsinks.
Heatpipes do seem to be primarily useful as a method of weight reduction, rather than superior conductive performance to copper.
As in, copper would most likely still be superior, but the issue is the amount of copper needed to adequately conduct the heat to the large finned surface areas, for which heatpipes can do an almost as effective job, but for MUCH less weight than an all-copper cooler could do.
I'm still of the firm belief that it would be very possible to construct an all-copper non-heatpipe cooler than will outperform the best heatpipe cooler on the market, and within a similar size, but the drawback would be the weight of it.