Nickel Electroplating and it's effect on cooling capacity of heatsink

Hey guys, I’ve got a cpu cooler( noctua NH D15) and the fins have discolored due to age so I was thinking I should electroplate it with nickel. I’ve done nickel Electroplating previously but I’m worried if it will have any kind of affect on cooling capabilities of the heatsink as it has copper vapour tubes.

I say don’t do it. The copper pipes are sealed, if compromised the liquid/vapours will escape, dropping the performance. Look into methods to restore the aluminum which are not harsh.

I’ve seen people do it with laptop heatsinks to use liquid metal

If you feel confident go ahead. I just googled NH D15, looks expensive to me, so I hesitated.

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I will share the results here

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I believe derbauer(on YT) saying it makes negligible difference in one of his videos.

I just want to make it shiny

Goodspeed

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A totally noob doubt, what will be the difference between shiny surface vs rough in dissipating heat ?
Tend to think that rough surface absorb temperature faster…

Blackbody is a perfect radiator of heat. Anything else is not.

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Black color absorbs heat, white reflects it.

OP may find this quite interesting:

“The result shows that with an increase of surface roughness, the thermal emissivity can increase up to 2.5 times.”

Hey, since I was interested in the cooler, i would like to ask, has the performance degraded?

I haven’t done it yet still waiting for nickel electrodes to arrive

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