Understanding How Heatsinks Work for Gaming CPUs

GamersNexus: "Picking the best CPU cooler / heatsink for your gaming rig is important if you're planning to keep things quiet or overclock your system; we'll cover noise level, cooling efficiency, and top-level thermal dissipation strategies for aftermarket coolers in this article."

[ProjectVulcan]

If you are pedantic and anally retentive then lap your cooler's surface contact area.

If you aren't then don't cos it'll hardly matter these days with such cool running processors on a decent heatsink, Intel ones anywaysss.......

You can overclock the nuts off an i5 2500k and on a fairly decent air cooler you'll still struggle to exceed 75 degrees loaded. Thats a bit warm, but a far cry from the days of Preshott Pentium 4's

[5yN4MWQU]

Generally you lap the CPU, but the performance gain is marginal and it tends to void the warranty. If you're the type of person who needs every single degree for some serious OC project, then it might be worth it... otherwise, not really.

[ProjectVulcan]

You can lap both.

However the reason you might have lapped a cooler first is because many multiple heatpipe tower coolers that are now hugely popular used to have less than stellar contact patches, even some expensive ones. Not brilliant finishing at the factory.

However after these designs have evolved a bit more over the past 3-4 years the finishing has improved and so it is mostly pointless if you have a decent one.

[Somebody]

Prescott...man, that thing whine so much. Of course that was back when better heat sinks was scarce in my place and I'm stuck with the stock Intel cooler. Imagine my surprise listening my Core2 Quad Q6600 with a Xigmatek tower H/S compared to the Prescott.

Then again...I'm still using stock Intel cooler for my current i5 2500K even though there are tons of great heatsinks available.