PAL8942 Heatsink From All Angles
	The Fans: With the fan mounted upside down, the heatsink is ready for business. In our tests we found that the Alpha PAL8942 does indeed operate a bit better with the fan in this exhaust orientation. The 80mm fan supports RPM monitoring and connects via a standard 3-pin motherboard fan header.
	Bare Heatsink: We counted 534 octagonal pins on the Alpha PAL8942, and looking down on them the do look pretty cool. The heatsink will only accept an 80mm fan as there are no holes drilled for a 70mm fan. This can easily be overcome with a simple fan adaptor, or some quick modifications to the fan shroud.
	Side A: You might not be able to notice that the outer row of hexagonal pins are tear drop shaped, but they are indeed. The reason for this change has to do with the fan orientation that Alpha recommend for the PAL8942. Unlike most other pin-based heatsinks, Alpha have the fan set to work in an exhaust orientation, with the air blowing up and away from the pins. In order to decrease pressure drop as the air enters the heatsink, the outer rows of pins are angled sharply, thus creating less resistance as air is sucked up into the array of pins. We originally thought better performance could be had with the fan in an impingement orientation, but several sets of tests debunked that theory pretty quickly (by about 2 degrees on average).
	Side B: The pins are all about 34mm in height and spaced roughly 2mm apart. The aluminum fan shroud keeps the 80mm Delta fan raised 6mm above the tips of the pins, and extends down 17mm. Four sets of screws and springs are used to hold the large heatsink in place. Because of its size, the PAL8942 can't use the standard socket 478 heatsink retention mechanism.
	Heatsink Base: The Alpha base is very, but there are some very fine machining marks which are still visible. Still, as base finishes go, the base finish is very good, though not quite as nice as say a Zalman fan heatsink. The four corners are all notched out so that the mounting points will remain recessed slightly. The copper heatspreader which is imbedded into the base of the heatsink is ~3.5mm thick and measures 72x62mm.