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Heat Sinks and Thermal Solutions for 1U Server Industry Applications

1U servers often pose an interesting thermal challenge to system and heatsink designers. 1U servers are compact (approximately 43mm thick), and rack mountable limiting the space for heatsink integration. They typically use 40mm axial fans or compact blowers to force air through the system or a heat sink. 1U servers are available with virtually any type of processor, from budget desktop, to power conservative mobile CPUs, to high end 32 bit and 64 bit processors hence a vide variety of heatsinks are used in these applications.

Heat Sinks and Thermal Solutions for 1U Servers

To meet the challenging 1U server thermal requirements, many types of heatsinks are available on the market. For low power CPUs, extruded aluminum heatsinks are often capable of dissipating the heat. If better performance is required, an all copper 1U heat sink may be necessary. Copper 1U heatsinks are typically either machined or skived, to achieve thin fins and high surface area. Heat Sink And Thermal Design However, copper 1U heatsinks typically have high pressure drops, which may require ducted airflow through the heatsink from the system fans.

Heat pipes can also be integrated into 1U heat sinks, which offers several advantages to the heatsink design. First, heat pipes allow the heat to be carried to open areas, or areas of high airflow increasing the heat dissipating capacity of heatsink design. In the cramped 1U systems, system layout can be very difficult, and heat pipes can simplify heatsink design and ease of manufacturing. Heat pipes can also improve the performance of a direct mounted 1U heat sink, by spreading the heat effectively in the heatsink base.

For higher heatsink performance, it may be necessary to use an active heatsink, which has fans mounted directly to the heat sink. 1U active heatsinks offer high performance, without depriving the rest of the system of forced airflow. Also, these heatsinks can give greater flexibility in the system design by allowing greater freedom in component placement. However, fans are often viewed as a high point of failure. For this reason, most of the 1U servers utilize system airflow for component and heat sink cooling.

Enertron offers several standard 1U server heatsink solutions. Please see our 1U server heat sinks product page for more information on these heatsink. Our 1U server heatsink solutions can also be modified to meet particular requirements. If you would like additional information on these heatsinks, please feel free to contact one of our thermal engineers.

Enertron also provides assistance for custom heat sink and thermal solution design for 1U server applications. For more information regarding Enertron's support of 1U Server Computer market and heat sink design, please contact us at 1-877-ENERTRON (1-877-363-7876).