Initial CAD & Costing
The cooler only has 7 distinct parts, 6 of which are custom manufactured. The five most critical components then are the mounting frame, fan blade, heatsink, locking plug and locking pin. To analyze these components, I recreated each of them in CAD as shown below.
Mounting Frame
Fan Blade
Heatsink
Locking Plug
Locking Pin
Full Assembly
Costing
With each of the critical components recreated digitally, I was able to run costing analysis simulations on these CAD models using the aPriori costing software. The results are shown in the table below.
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These costs are compared to estimated costs of similar parts found on McMaster-Carr. Due to the fact that most of these parts are custom made and very specific to this application, McMaster does not carry similar parts to many of these.
A single whole fan was used to compare to the collection of fan parts found as a whole and a generic finned heatsink was found to compare with the specifically-shaped one on the Intel stock cooler. Also, nothing similar to the locking plug and pin was found on McMaster, so a similarly-sized and featured plastic screw anchor was used for comparison.
Unfortunately I was unable to produce a properly simulated costing of the heatsink with aPriori due to its complex geometry. These heatsinks are typically made either an extrusion process, or with a specialized forming machine which slices and folds each fin up from a solid block of aluminum.
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As neither of these manufacturing methods is available in aPriori and I was unable to operate the manual costing setup, the closest option available of "cast machining" produced a fully-burdened cost estimate of $65,342 per part.
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The above figure of $1.11 is a combination of the raw material cost (about $0.27 per part) with an added factor, and an aPriori simulation of making the part via die casting.