PC Cooling Shower Thought

[Hybris5112]

For a long time people have been polishing the contacts on their air coolers/water blocks to a mirror shine to get as much metal to metal contact as possible with thermal paste filling in all the gaps that a given metal surface has.

 

But what if you went the other way and had a CPU heatspreader that was knurled and had a matching air/water block to interface with it (Another design would be more like a meat tenderizer). My thoughts that it would work better due to the increased surface area would allow more direct metal to metal contact for heat transfer and might not even need thermal paste to fill in any gaps due to the shape of the surfaces locking on to each other.

 

Does this sound like a plausible idea?

[Crunchy Dragon]

I think it sounds plausible. I doubt manufacturers would do this however. It reminds me of an idea I came up with a while ago for ridged heatsinks, which drastically increase surface area and allow more heat to be dissipated more efficiently.

[Hybris5112]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I think it sounds plausible. I doubt manufacturers would do this however. It reminds me of an idea I came up with a while ago for ridged heatsinks, which drastically increase surface area and allow more heat to be dissipated more efficiently.

Agreed the extra tooling and material costs would probably add up rather quickly and likely not justify the improvement if any.