so, after seeing this:
http://hothardware.com/News/Silent-Powe ... f-Awesome/
it got me thinking.
1. it's going to attract a **** ton of dust.
2. why does it have to be external?
3. No heatpipes? it's all conductive.
But what if we took the standard tower-style CPU heatsink, with heatpipes, forced airflow with a fan, and hopefully inside a case that has dust filters and positive pressure?
would it be better than today's designs? Smaller heatsinks with better dissipation? One problem i've seen is, basically, smooth flowing air is actually bad for dissipation. you want turbulence and high surface area. Foam does that well, smooth parallel fins, not as much.