And that's why a piece of metal which has been engineered with no other purpose in life than to shunt heat from one end to the other can cost more than a dual-core state of the art leading edge cpu that powers the entire computer.
An 89 inch tall commercial propane heater is
$140 with shipping included. Oh these heatsinks
cost way less than a leading dual core CPU to produce. It's just we are
willing to pay $70-80 for some 1 Kg of metal with 2 fans, which probably cost Noctua $20-25 in total to manufacture. Think about it, Corsair's A70 with 2 fans often sells for
$30 after MIR (and Corsair still makes money). But to us top air coolers such as the Silver Arrow, Archon and NH-D14 are like air cooling p0rn!
BTW, there is nice new air cooler from NZXT:
Havik 140.
Thank about this, 3 years ago the Thermalright IFX-14 sold for $79.99 without any fans. Now we get Noctua NH-D14 or Silver Arrow with better performance and 2 fans included for "free". That's not bad