Thermal Integration TI-V86L Copper Core Heatsink

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With the increasing number of copper core heatsinks flooding the cooling markets, it's a wonder that any company's are still left without this type of heatsink in their product lines. The Thermal Integration TI-V86L series are designed to cool the Athlon and PIII cores from 1.5GHz/1.1GHz and up and employ a few touches to make that job easier.

However, the first thing most people seem to notice is that the cooler is shaped like an "X" and positioned on its edge. Given that the average extruded heatsink is make to sit on the processors and exhaust air out parallel to the chip this is a somewhat revolutionary design, albeit a very simple one. In addition to maximizing the working surface area of the heatsink, this orientation squarely dumps all of the exhaust air from the fan on the heat source, further cooling it down. This is one of the main reasons this style of heatsink is capable of producing such good results. And obviously, the faster the fan, the more pronounced the effect.

	Heatsink Specsheet: Model: TI-V86L Fan: T&T, 5400RPM, 12V, 0.35A. Fan Dim: 15x60x60mm Heatsink Dim: 47x80x60mm HS Material: Extruded Aluminum and Copper Mfg by: Thermal Integration Cost: ~$29 Sold By: Thermal Integration

The TI-V86L series have a slightly longer design than the well known TI-V77L which uses a square extrusion for the sake of the 70mm fan. Both heatsinks appear to be of about the same surface area and both use identical copper slugs.

Being the curious type here at FrostyTech, we ripped one of these heatsinks down to its component parts to se how well they were assembled. The copper slug is turned and polished before it is installed in the aluminum fin section, so the surface finish is very smooth. Conversely, the aluminum fin section looks like it has been reamed and then polished on the inside. The cavity has a mirror finish on the inside. From that point, if I remember my Mech Eng. right, the aluminum section would be heated up, and the copper slug cooled and pressed into the cavity with a hydraulic press of some description.

We used a lower tech version to get the copper slug out of the heatsink, and it wasn't easy, which is good. The fit between the copper and the aluminum is tight, and that is good for thermal transfer.

Possible Heatsink Modification:

On a side note, if anyone out there wants to drop a bar of pure silver onto a good machine lathe and turn it to exactly 20.0mm (by 25.74mm long) diameter you could replace the copper slug with something a bit more thermally conductive. If anyone tries this, be sure and let us know how things turn out.