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Globalwin have certainly been cranking out the new designs lately. It's getting hard to keep up. This latest socket-cooler unit is almost dissapointingly small to those of us used to such monsters as the FDP-32 and VOS-32. Of course, the basic principle behind heatsinks involves a lot of air moving over a lot of metal - the more surface area and the more airflow, the better. Increasing airflow introduces problems of noise and the heat created by the fan itself. However, as the FDP-32 and VOS-32 both show, a huge heatsink can introduce more problems, mounting difficulties and the sheer weight of the unit causing slot adapters to come loose etc. With this new unit, the FKP-32, GlobalWin seem to be making large steps towards smaller, more efficient heatsinks.

FKP-32 on the left, FDP-32 on the right. Guess which one is more likely to fit your motherboard?

I thought I'd compare this unit, perhaps a little unfairly, with the winner of our previous Socket370 Cooler Comparison, the Globalwin FDP-32. Also I included the unusual SuperDual Socket370 which has proven since that comparo to be slightly more efficient than the FDP, consistently about a degree celcius cooler. For sheer comedy value, I also included the standard retail heatsink+fan unit supplied with the Coppermine CPU. Finally, the big guns came out in the form of the Alpha PAL6035MUC. This copper-bottomed baby will suck the heat out of your CPU almost as quickly as it sucks the money from your credit card.

Globalwin have a couple of new features in this unit. Firstly, the fins are very thin and more closely packed together than I've seen on any of their coolers. Also, the fan is held on with a couple of strange wire clips which actually make it very easy to remove. Hopefully they will stick with this kind of idea instead of screws in their future designs. The fan itself is, unsurprisingly, the same Y.S.Tech 60mm unit they seem to be using on all their coolers these days (one notable exception being the FKK-50). This fan pumps out 26CFM - not the quietest fan around, but a decent performer and, being a double ball-bearing unit, should be very reliable.

I tested the unit on a PPGA Celeron 400 and an FC-PGA Coppermine P3-500E. Of course, the PPGA and FC-PGA sockets can take the same heatsinks (indeed, so can the Socket7 and Socket5 of the "classic" Pentium and Pentium MMX days). However, you can't just slap any old PPGA heatsink onto an FC-PGA. For a start, as shown below, the size of the slug, the raised part which contains the silicon heart of the chip, is much smaller on the new Coppermine CPU's.

PPGA Celeron on the left, FC-PGA Coppermine P3 on the right.
The Celeron is copper-coloured because it's been fully sanded - they're normally silver.

This means that not only do you have to get heat out of a smaller area (so the material comprising the base of the heatsink becomes more important), but it's also much harder to tell when you have a heatsink sitting flush on the CPU slug. This of course is vital because the slightest air-gap is going to severely hamper the heatsink's performance. Certain PPGA coolers can be used, but make sure they're flat on the slug! You can use a spacer which goes around the slug and stops the heatsink tipping, or, if everything lines up perfectly, you can rest the edge of the heatsink on the raised lip of the socket, as I did with the SuperDual in the photo below.

The SuperDual resting on the edge of the FC-PGA socket. This probably won't work with every
combination of heatsink and slocket, but it works pretty well here. Sorry about the crap photo.

Of course, you can only get a flush fit if the two surfaces (the cpu slug and the bottom of the heatsink) are pretty much perfectly flat. Coppermine CPU's come with a pretty blue slug - and a pretty dang flat slug, too. However, the PPGA celerons are famous for the non-flatness of their slugs. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it - slug sanding. No, it's not what you're thinking, that's slug salting, and a horrible way to spend an afternoon. Slug sanding is the process of grinding the cpu slug flat using progressively finer and finer sandpaper until you get it very flat - if done properly, a mirror finish. About 6 months ago I wrote a How-To article on Celeron Slug-Sanding, which apparently (given the amount of traffic it's still attracting) didn't completely suck. You can read it here, if you're interested. Finally, regardless of how snug a fit you think you have, use thermal paste. A thin layer is all you need. Even if both surfaces look really flat, use paste anyway (unless you're looking through a scanning electron microscope, in which case ok, they're really flat).