Heat sink find

I found an old Dell tower pc. I think it’s about 2004 vintage. It has a pentium4. I almost left it but decided maybe it had some heat sinks. I had no idea how hot pentium4 runs. This thing has a massive heat sink with heat pipes and cooling fins and a shroud and 9x9cm 12 v 2.5a fan. The fan blades are metal which I don’t think I’ve seen in a pc before. This pentium4 chip must melt without a heat sink.

It’s over kill for the LimeSDR but there are other heatsinks in the mainboard and the pcie GPU which may find a new purpose.

Yes, the P4 was notorious for its thermal generation capability.

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That’s amusing.
As far as cpus go the area of the chip is small. I took off the heatsink and it’s the 3GHz model. I never knew anything about the pentium4. But now I know if someone’s got a pentium4 system they don’t need that the heat sinks are now worth much more than the chip.

The heatsink’s got a big slug of copper embedded into aluminum which has then 6 15cm heat pipes that go through a radiator stack of thin aluminum plates. This is enclosed on 3 sides by a shroud that the metal blade fan is attached to and then the fan exhausts directly out the back of the case. Must have been a very significant cost to the system. It’s really well made. I mean the entire assembly comes apart. Except the heatsink, heatpipes and radiator are one piece.