Mobo with Painted Heatsinks- Efficiency Drop??

[Jake Fister]

Ok, so I'm an engineer and I've taken heat transfer, so I know what the theory has to say about it, but I was wondering if there are any of you that have first hand experience doing this. I found an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX on craigslist for $40 (yes it works) but the heat sinks have been painted white (which would actually match my build perfectly) but I was wondering if anyone has had experience with this hurting the efficiency of the heat sink? Technically it should only affect the convection heat transfer rate minimally depending how thick and what kind of paint they used. Anyways. Input??

 

[Karsten75]

overclcock3d.net has several older threads on this. A lot of speculation also.

 

[Jake Fister]

http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=46321

Here is one. As I was reading the experiment on the first page and saw the results, I do think the results may be slightly flawed because of the problem with the heat sink clip, but I also remembered that a matte finished surface dumps heat through radiation better than a shiny surface (that's why you see so many heat sinks that don't have fans are colored a flat black) and perhaps this had an effect.