Penny fer a heatsink, guv'nor?

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Friday, January 16th, 2009

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I’m no rocket therapist but isn’t using a potentially fally-offy penny as a heatsink a bit dangerous in the aggregate but this little test of weird heatsinks is actually pretty cool. They used a few permutations here: paperclip, bolted penny, glued penny, and four pennies in series. The results are startling.

The standard heatsink had a median temperature of 75.3 degrees Celcius while a paper clip had 86.9 degrees. A soldered or epoxied penny hit about 90 degrees while a penny bolted to a component hit 89.9 degrees. The best heatsink? A quad penny set-up with four pennies bolted to a component. Very cool.

via BBG

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