@sforza If you used a thick copper plate, it would quickly spread the heat away from the COB, but it needs surface area to dissipate that heat. So the heat has to pass through the thermal interface between your plate and the aluminum heatsink surface to get to the fins. The quality of your thermal interface would affect how much resistance was created. The resistance could cause a slight thermal gradient, which would lead to a slightly higher junction temp in the COB and therefore more temp droop (light loss)
So in practice if your thermal interface was very good, you might reduce your temp droop from 2% to 1.5% or something along those lines (with a hard running CXA3590). But if the thermal interface was poor for any reason, it could increase your temp droop from 2% to 5% for example. If you are running your CXA3590s soft (~25-50W), you are probably getting less than 1% temp droop, maybe even less than .5%. In that case there are no significant gains to be had by investing in more cooling.
The heatsinks we use are normally a nice 1 pound chunk of aluminum/copper. I have tested temp droop of CXA3070s of different heatsinks at high dissipation levels (100W) to see which perform best. So far the winner has been the large heat pipe style OCZ Vanquisher. Second place the blow through style with copper core, like
this, although the mounting surface is too small for CXA3590 or Vero29. The Rosewill RCX-Z1 and RCX-Z200 use copper plates mounted to aluminum and the performance is similar to the Alpine11 which is solid aluminum.
All at 2.47A:
OCZ Vanquisher (large heat pipe style cooler) with CXA3070 3K AB = 2.6%
blow through style Intel with CXA3070 3K Z4 = 3% temp droop
Rosewill RCX-Z1 with CXA3070 3K AB = 4.5%
Alpine 11 with CXA3070 3K AB = 3.5-4.5%
Rosewill RCX-Z1 with Vero 29 3K = 2% temp droop
CXA3590 so far untested