We don’t have formal specs for this heat sink, but when we ran ‘stress -c 4’ on the Pi 3 to run all 4 CPUs, a heat-sink-less Pi quickly dropped down to 0.96 GHz to maintain thermal equilibrium. With this heat sink installed, it could run at 1.16GHz (so, 20% higher performance)

Note that you do not need a heatsink for the Pi 3, it will automatically adjust its speed to avoid overheating! It can also, of course, be used for other processors and chips.

With PC’s and Laptops the CPU has a fan to keep things cool as the CPU’s get very hot and will be damaged without it. The Raspberry Pi’s has low power requirements so the CPU dosn’t need cooling to stop damage. If a Raspberry Pi 3 gets to 85^oC the processor speed will be halved allowing things to cool down. The down side is it will now take longer for the task you are doing to complete.

Available on Embeded Studio