Unusual find in a server - Copper Heat Sink

I recently won, at auction, a load of servers. I opened 2 of them and found these Copper Heat Sinks in them. I've never seen pure copper heat sinks like this.

The auction total ended up at about $276 but after premium and taxes, it ended up at a little over $320. I still kept the price per server at around $6 a piece. I haven't broke them all down yet but if each of the servers has copper heat sinks, I'm calculating the total weight in copper alone to be near 100 lbs. That's close to breaking even on heat sinks alone. There was one lot that had 45 of the smaller servers in it at this auction and the winner paid over $450 for the lot, but I'd imagine after taxes and premium, the total was well over $500. Sometimes I don't understand other peoples math. I bought mine in lots of 10 and kept my price at $5-5.50 per lot. This company is out of business so it will be near impossible to sell working units of unknown brand servers such as these.



I looked up Paxfire on Google today and found out the company had a Class Action lawsuit filed against it sometime back in 2011. Apparently, they were working with 10 ISP's such as RCN, Hughe's, Cavalier, and Frontier (Yikes, that's our ISP!), and placing a proxy server between the individual and major search engines. If a person used a search engine such as Bing or Google, and did a search for, say, "Apple or Dell", they were redirecting the persons directly to those websites, instead of listing websites to choose from. You know, when you do a search for, lets say "Scrap", usually a list of something like 300,000 websites are found for you to choose from. Well, by redirecting a person directly to the "Apple" website, after entering "Apple" into the search bar, Paxfire would be able to claim a referral fee of like $1 per user that's been redirected. That's called HiJacking. Also, when a user entered a nonexistent domain name into the URL bar of his browser, Paxfire's DNS server would direct the user to a Paxfire-sponsored page of search results rather than returning an error message. This search page would generate advertising revenue, which Paxfire would share with its ISP clients. Shady stuff involved as I read this stuff.

Welcome to the world of servers. Copper heat sinks are very common in them. And your ram box will fill up quick!

Kane333. The 'Paxfire'. Hell, thats similar to what I heard ol' Kim Dotcom is intending to do here soon. Remove adds & replace them with his own advertising & getting $$$ from that.

Love slipknot in backgrund

You will find some heavy copper cpu heatsinks in some computers about 4-5yrs old...m9stly enthusiast (custom) machines. They were marketed to people who overclocked for heat dissipation. I have pulled about 3 recently.

Oh and the paxfire stuff ..many obline marketers were doing that with the old toolbars. If the company caches you doing that (replacing the cookie dtring with yours) they take all of your commissions away. Granted all depends on the company. Many other like that do what is called cookie stuffing...changing all cookies to websites they earn affiliate commissions from to their number. So say an amazon.com cookie is good for 90 days...they cange the exsisting one on your computer and you go back and buy something you saw from another website, the toolbar company gets the sale and not the origonal referrer. Many of them made HUGE amounts of mo ey doing that.

I've come across very heavy heatsinks in a bunch of servers that "appear" to be aluminum (in color), but are obviously too heavy. I figured they were a type of coated copper, as other metals would not conduct the heat as well. Can anyone confirm if these are indeed copper, or what other type of metal they may be. As stated, they look just like a normal heat sink with a solid base and fins above, but the weight tells me they are something besides aluminum.

hit it with the grinder, you will know if its plated copper or stainless or AL.

Originally Posted by SuperDave

hit it with the grinder, you will know if its plated copper or stainless or AL.

thanks for the reply. I was thinking that it might be stainless at first, but didn't think they would use SS as it doesn't disperse heat like copper/alum. Now gotta break out the grinder. i'm hoping for copper lol

Originally Posted by shendog

I've come across very heavy heatsinks in a bunch of servers that "appear" to be aluminum (in color), but are obviously too heavy. I figured they were a type of coated copper, as other metals would not conduct the heat as well. Can anyone confirm if these are indeed copper, or what other type of metal they may be. As stated, they look just like a normal heat sink with a solid base and fins above, but the weight tells me they are something besides aluminum.

The base is tinned copper (#2 copper value) The fins are aluminum. An air chisel with a wide straight bit will knock the fins loose in a few seconds. Well worth the time. You can verify that it is copper with a grinder or a drill bit as the coating isn't very thick. These heat sinks are fairly common in older Dell and HP servers.

this is why I love getting them at auction for $5 10 tops but I buy a lot from auctions for $5each since most have maybe a 40gb harddrive or none were I buy and love the copper my yard loves them too lol its amazing though the weight usually 1to1.5lbs I average each one and putting them in a bucket never looks like much until you go to lift it I love loading 150-200lbs in a plastic tub and seeing who at the yard can lift them like I can lol plus they resale very well usually $10each but I find them to be very slow sales vs other parts but saving 30-50 here and there to sell is fun

Nothing unusual about Cu heat sinks, a lot of servers and some high end desktops have them. Still they are a nice bonus, and I'm always happy to see them.

so the lot you bought were blade servers... GOD what a deal.. Those servers if running, are about 1000 dollars a piece. You have me drooling... I would love to fix one of those racks and sell them off one by one.

Originally Posted by ravermagik

so the lot you bought were blade servers... GOD what a deal.. Those servers if running, are about 1000 dollars a piece. You have me drooling... I would love to fix one of those racks and sell them off one by one.

Where are you seeing used blade servers for $1000 apiece?!