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If you’ve been in the overclocking arena for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard mention of the Alpha cooler. It has carved its place with beautiful design manufacturing, and low temperature scores and has no doubt become a standard to gauge other coolers by. The PAL 6035 is no different. This is the second installment in our multipart Socket cooler miniseries, and will take a close look into the design, temperature scores, and overall qualities of the PAL 6035 Alpha Cooler.

First Glance

The PAL 6035 cooler comes shipped un-assembled. Included is an illustrated installation flyer to walk you through assembly and installation, plus all of the parts needed to get it going. Once assembled, the cooler looks very impressive. The first thing I noticed was the weight of the assembled cooler. It was heavier than the other coolers I have tested thus far, and this is probably due in part to the copper inlay on the bottom face of the heatsink. Copper? Yes Copper! (See picture) Because copper is a better conductor of heat then aluminum, it is more suitable a material for heatsinks, from a performance standpoint. Copper is more costly than aluminum, however, and it would be too expensive to build the entire sink from copper, so instead Alpha molded a copper inlay right into the heatsink dye, so that the CPU would have direct physical contact with the more conductive copper metal, allowing the cooler to absorb the heat more quickly from the CPU and dissipate it into the rest of the aluminum sink. This feature alone could prove to be the cooler of choice for you Coppermine owners, since the Coppermine core is exposed to the elements!