[Señor_Striatum]

I was going to PM this message to KillerBug but decided to create a thread so that the answer was available to anyone interested...but by all means if anyone knows the answer or a way to obtain the answer please let me know.

I just installed some heat sinks on my PS3 and while I have been rest assured that it's surface area is large enough to dissipate the heat produced by the MOBO hardware, I do not know how to determine this on my own. I have been looking through forums, google, and I cant find my physics books for the life of me. I want to obtain some kind of measure or equation to calculate how much surface area is required by a heat sink and/or how large of a radiator is required for a given CPU or GPU with X amount of heat generated. All I come across is a Quick Cooling Formula expressed in British Thermal units in which for each piece of equipment in the room:
Watts x 3.4 = BTU OR (Volts x Amps) x 3.4 = BTU

The only other useful way I found was to actually analyze various heatsinks and radiators whose Delta T have been graphed from experimental data collected. See http://www.skinneelabs.com/ The problem with this is that the majority of these hardware are high end hardware or PC popular hardware that cannot be used with the PS3.

I was under the impression that the amount of heat generated could be measured by the amount of wattage produced by the hardware. I found that the power consumption of the initial PlayStation 3 units based on 90 nm Cell CPU ranges from 170–200 watts during normal use, despite having a 380 watt power supply. Please see http://www.ps3devwiki.com/index.php?title=CELL_BE. So how large of a surface area or what value of Delta T (when considering liquid cooling) is necessary? Do majority of people say f*** it and get as large of a heatsink that can fit? Dont mean to be technical but I have some plans for my PS3 and need to be able to do this myself. Thanks in advance...