Maybe call it an "iSink"… after indibil’s original approach?

It isn’t pretty (yet) but the first “replicant” here is finally complete.


                     Could use a bit of cleaning (copper dust particles, etc.) and some emery cloth smoothing of the rough fin edges.

"like"

It's great to have you here in Mac OS 9 Lives, as well, @laulandn!

@aBc Thanks for those links!

I really doubt House of Moth's claim on graphite thermal pads beating Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut (let alone the superior Kryonaut Extreme), but I can't say I tried them personally, so... *shrug* Who knows.

@GaryN That's a good point with regards to the processor height difference in the MDX, in terms of getting the copper heatsink to do its job properly. However, you should still be able to use it properly for both CPUs if you add copper shims (one or multiple). Using 7448 and 7457 processors, and/or interposer boards, instead of the usual 7447 or 7455 with MDX and stock daughtercards also leads to those kinds of height concerns. The opposite is also true: Washers/spacers also help with when the CPUs are too high for the heatsink. Quoting one of my linked comments:

If using any of the 3 stock heatsinks, use copper shim(s) for the 7457 to take into account its slightly lower height compared to the stock 7455, or, in the case of the 7448 that has additional height due to the interposer board, use washers/spacers between the posts and heatsink to raise the height at which the heatsink stands.

If you ever give this a try, let us know how it worked out with your MDX card.

Perhaps you could delegate this work to someone affordable, so that they make 20000 of these. Then you sell and ship worldwide! I would totally buy some of these! If I was rich, at least 5 units!

Copper itself AFAIK is quite costly, though, even at this size. Then there's the time cost, expertise cost, and manufacturing cost (materials, electricity etc.). So... This would understandably have to be sold for a "respectable" price in order for the effort to be worth it!

Just saying. New business startup? "Mac mini G4 Industries Ltd." or, maybe to avoid an overly-protective Apple, "Fruit mini G4 Industries Ltd.".

My memory says it was already discussed, but the posts must have been deleted:
Heatsinks are never made of "stainless". It conducts heat extremely poorly. What is really at play is chrome-plated aluminum, which has a mirror-like finish.

Well, that's why the word is in "quotes", isn't it? It's only to differentiate it from the thick-finned aluminum one.

So, performance wise by the numbers, the copper heat sink still takes it home, the metal heat sink comes in second and the aluminum heat sink comes in last. Common knowledge is that the metal heat sink sucks, is useless, should be avoided etc. but these temperature readings show otherwise. What does make the metal heat sink a poor choice is the system instability it somehow causes. - House of Moth

It's been said before, but stuff gets lost or just unseen in a gazillion posts, so I'll repeat:

The copper sink with the heat pipes, although it's the most efficient of the three with original Apple 7450s, cannot, repeat cannot be used with the Sonnet MDX card!
The 7447's are NOT located in exactly the same place and only one of them will cool properly. The other one will overheat and die.
I too, tried all of the sinks and settled on the "stainless" for that reason. It was disappointing for sure, as I had previously had a 2x1.42 Xserve CPU card in there with the copper sink and it was clearly the coolest one…   It's a trap waiting to spring since you can't actually see they don't align properly when installing the sink. You can only tell if you pull it up again and notice the compound is partly undisturbed over one CPU.

As for the Moth saying the stainless causes some kind of mystery "instability", that is not my experience at all. I haven't had a crash or the smallest hiccup even once. I suspect that a lot of people with little or no knowledge of thermodynamics are also doing amateur fan changes and mods at the same time. The MDD was called the "wind tunnel" because that was how it was designed. It needed to move a LOT of air through a cluttered, tight space with the main fan and it ended up generating probably a LOT more noise than they would have liked but they were married to the case design and it was the last G4 built, using Xserve stuff, to fill the gap behind the G5 that was taking forever to finish… so long that they soon even had to add another stopgap model for LESS money, the FW800. It's never a good thing when you have to offer an entire new PSU and fan to your customers FOR FREE because you've sold them the noisiest home computer ever made.

What's equally as remarkable is that you would think after all that, the G5 would have been whisper-quiet. Oops…