With the prologue of new components with more and more heat dissipation, urge for novel heat sink philosophy is becoming a real challenge in today's world. The new solutions should be able to cope with massive heat emanation while keeping the space and cost constraints. Finned (plate and pin) heat sinks are contrivance to these challenges with growing applications in present-day engineering arena and drawing the concentration of researchers. Paper deals with the critical review of different heat sink designs, limiting factors, effectiveness, limitations of various techniques and recent advancements in the field of innovative heat sinks. This study initiates with brief and comprehensive discussion regarding importance of heat sinks, its methodology; it's suitability for present day heat dissipation issues, statistical data of various heat sink designs and a rich discussion of the work so far. The sole aspiration for this article is digging out the literature available so far with emphasis on experimental techniques and to propose strategy for future research. The outcome of the research will validate the concept of improved heat transfer approach, provide useful data for innovative design and help better understand the cooling capabilities of the pin fin technology. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.