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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a porous medium model for forced air convection in pin/plate-fin heat sinks subjected to non-uniform heating of a hot gas impinging jet. Parametric studies are performed to provide comparisons between inline square pin-fin and plate-fin heat sinks in terms of overall and local thermal performance for a fixed pressure drop. Design/methodology/approach – Heat conduction in substrates is coupled with forced convection in the pin/plate-fin flow channel. The forced convection is considered by employing the non-Darcy model for fluid flow and the thermal non-equilibrium model for heat transfer. A series of experiments is performed to validate the model for both the pin-fin and plate-fin heat sinks. Findings – The present porous medium model is capable of capturing the presence of lateral heat spreading in the plate-fins and the absence of lateral heat spreading in the pin-fins under non-uniform thermal boundary condition, attributing to the adoption of the orthotropic effective thermal conductivity for the solid phase in the energy equation. The present results show that the inline square pin-fin heat sink has topological advantage over the plate-fin heat sink, although the heat spreading through the plate-fins on reducing the peak temperature on the substrate is pronounced. Originality/value – This paper reports an original research on theoretical modeling of forced convection in pin/plate-fin heat sinks subjected to the non-uniform heating of an impinging jet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]