Cutting Open a Heatsink Heatpipe To See Inside 132
An anonymous reader writes "Frostytech gets to the heart of Zalman's CNPS11X heatsink by cutting a section of heatpipe from the CPU cooler to inspect its inner composite heatpipe wick structure. Now that's an in-depth heatsink review! Interesting photos of the dissected heatpipe's composite wick — sintered copper powder on top and axial groove wick below — that you're unlikely to see elsewhere. In the late 1960s the first commercial heatpipes were used by NASA to stabilize satellite temperatures; now they stabilize multi-core processors."
Oblig Futurama reference (Score:3)
That's pure heatsink pr0n, those heatsinks don't stay inside cases.
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hah.
Funny enough though, I get the feeling with the current generation of CPU's, we're just about at the end of basic air cooling. Especially since sealed liquid cooling units are becoming dirt cheap. For the price you pay for this one, you can pick up a sealed unit that has half the noise ratio. So if you really want to build a nice quiet system you can.
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Huh? with heatpipe tech I can go fanless, that's 800X quieter than a sealed liquid setup.
There are massive i5, i7 and amd heatpipe setups available. you nee a giant case for it, and some guys even add more supports, and if you set up the case right you get a chimney effect that causes good airflow without any fans AND still running full clock speeds.
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It looked like it might have been the end of basic air cooling with the Pentium 4.
Chips keep on getting more and more efficient, producing less and less heat for the same amount of work being performed.
It used to be that water cooling was almost required, but now people are getting over 4 ghz on air cooling.
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"we're just about at the end of basic air cooling"
Not even close.
See this? [imgur.com] This is 300w in a 30mm x 30mm package.
Regular aluminum/copper/combo heatsinks simply won't cool it.
A copper-cored heat sink covered with high-pressure blasted carbon dust has zero issues keeping it cool.
Bear in mind I had to use an Itanium II MX2 heat sink (already rated for 260+w TDP) and modify it a bit (pure copper wouldn't dissipate/radiate heat fast enough) but we're by NO means done with air cooling.
Especially with Mesophasic C
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Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is this fancy heatsink stuff akin to audiophiles and their speaker wire? How much of a performance gain are we really talking about? I only have a bunch of crappy laptops, so I really have no idea.
heatsinks... (Score:2)
No, heatsinks can either make you able to go fanless, or go to overclock heaven, your choice. :)
Speaker wire, however, is worth what you can get someone to pay for it, apparently.
I have actually had someone show me a car stereo system that he believed sounded better with 12awg stranded silver speaker wires. I wish I'd sold it to him, lol.
I'm an Analog Engineer, and listen mostly to mp3s from a sound card. Zip cord will work just fine... :)
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Depends on the zip cord. I've had common, clear vinyl-insulated zip cord turn all gross and corroded inside down the entire length, and while that may not actually affect things much, it does make good (clean) connections rather difficult to accomplish.
I use direct-burial low-voltage lighting cable a lot, these days. It's cheap, easy to find, heavily insulated (durable), has a high strand count (ie: flexible), is UV resistant, and it's always been bright and shiny when I cut into it. Oh, and it's black b
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Interesting sig... (Score:2)
"LostCluster as of 10/27/11 is being held in captivity involuntarily by Dr. McGarry of Worcester State Hospital."
So, is it for you or for us?
Before anyone else says it... (Score:5, Funny)
> In the late 1960s the first commercial heatpipes were used by NASA to stabilize satellite temperatures
Why didn't they just use fans? ...um, what? ...Really? Oh. Never mind.
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That is so incredibly untrue that I don't even know where to begin.
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That's certainly an irrefutable argument you've got going for you there.
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Nothing but the very best for slashdot.
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You might want to start with the /s at the end.
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You are correct. In my hair trigger indignation, I missed that.
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Damn, I thought Ron Paul was posting on slashdot
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Seriously? Ron Paul said that? It's certainly not a Libertarian view.
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See class: This is how FUD is spread...
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That was me being skeptical, which if there was truth in it, the originator would follow up with a link or something. Nothing so far.
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Ah. Ok, you got me.
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Especially these days.
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Especially since it's a strategy of the GOP to attract the stupid and crazy away from the left.
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Wow, you're following Slashdot from Zuccotti Park?
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No, it doesn't. We don't have a typographical function to denote sarcasm. Sorry, but just making shit up on the spot doesn't work (unless you make it obvious and expand '/s' to '/sarcasm' - which makes the poster just lazy)
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Maybe *you* don't, but almost every site with comments (forums, blogs, etc...) /s is pretty recognized as "the preceding is sarcasm and I wrote that so as not to invoke Poe's Law".
/s <---- Ooo, I'm being META!
I'm serious.
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... first time I've ever seen it, and I hardly live under a rock.
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There's your problem. If you lived under a rock (or in your parent's basement), you could spend your entire life online and you'd know these things.
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The post was quite clearly sarcastic, if seen in conjunction with it's parent.
Poe's law, however, is invoked with each sarcastic remark. It even extends beyond
Always remember: an infinite publy contains one infinitely stupid person and an infi
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I like using ~ as opposed to /s. Of course no-one understands that either...
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The above post brought to you by the american Tea Party.
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Not that I've ever heard. The Tea Partiers I know of understand that we got more than TANG from the space program, and are really excited about private space exploration.
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Which is it? Do they know we got more than TANG from the space program and want to fund it properly and continue it or do they support pushing "private alternatives" which basically just means cutting funding.
Being really excited about the "private alternatives" sounds pretty consistent with "The free market certainly would've far surpassed the successes of NASA if not for regulations and taxation." Which really just translates to 'random bs that sounds good' so we should reduce taxes for the wealthy.
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> Which is it? Do they know we got more than TANG from the space program and want to fund it properly and continue it or do they support pushing "private alternatives" which basically just means cutting funding.
Which is what? That's a false choice. Being familiar with the benefits of, say, the run-up to the moon shot, is differenting from "want to fund it properly", and "properly" is a whole 'nother discussion. There is a school of thought that the government funded process of deploying a spacecraft h
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> Why didn't they just use fans? ...
That is because the fans may act as propellers... and push/pull the satellite away? ...Oh wait,... may be solar wind is free up there so no fan is needed?
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I realize I'm in danger of sounding like Dr. Sheldon Cooper, but since this is Slashdot, I'll assume you meant that as humor. I've had so many science arguments in the movies newsgroups, that I despair of ever having an intelligent conversation again. My last argument was with someone who insisted that a hole in a spacecraft would logically result in all the air exiting the spacecraft at the speed of sound. "Why the speed of sound? I mean, why that particular speed?" "Because, you know, that's the spee
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That's either funny in a profoundly geeky way, or a perfect illustration of the perils of a public education. I don't know which.
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I graduated with a liberal arts degree so not all of us remember everything from science class...
which leads me to this question: I understand why you can't have fans in space (lack of air). But why couldn't you just expose the processor to the vacuum of space? Obviously, with some sort of shielding for radiation, space debris, etc.
I know that water-cooled processors pretty much just expose water-filled pipes to the actual processor and then cycle it around thus cooling it off. But with just a vacuum, co
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Actually no – water cooling is ultimately air cooling, but in a different place. All water cooling does is move the heat to a big radiator. The reason it's more efficient is because the radiator is bigger.
This is why things like the Corsair H60/70 are utterly pointless – the radiator is exactly as big as the radiators you get on cheaper air coolers.
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Not utterly pointless. It still moves the heat outside the case and disperses it there rather than heating the air inside the case.
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Actually, those kits are designed to mount on the inside of the rear case fan mounting points.
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I had a similar one from coolermaster that did mount on the rear case fan mounting points but did so on the outside the case. Not sure about these units specifically.
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Uhhh, yes, ultimately, the engine is cooled by air flowing over a large radiator, hence why they have fans to keep the air moving even when you're stopped. As I said above the advantage of water cooling is *that the radiator can be bigger*.
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But with just a vacuum, couldn't that heat just go out as energy?
Technically, you could, but radiation is far less efficient than conduction or convection for transferring heat.
Power transferred via thermal radiation is proportional to surface area, something a processor has very little of (a square inch or so). Given orbital temperatures, you would be able to radiate away about 0.35 watts, which is decidedly insufficient for most purposes.
Hence why you need a radiator with loads of surface area and a method of moving the heat from the processor to that radiation, such
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Ah. That makes sense. I figured heat from the sun makes it here, why doesn't the satelitr "cool off" the same way.
Then again the sun is frickin' huge.
If you ever need a deconstruction of Shakespearian plays, you can count on me.
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If you ever need a deconstruction of Shakespearian plays, you can count on me.
It's OK, I've got this one.
"This play is a play written to appeal to as many people as possible in order to pay Shakespeare's bills and support his family. It was probably written over the course of a few weeks to months and thus we cannot assume that every word in it has the seventeen layers of intrigue and meaning that my professor told me they have. Furthermore, we probably cannot assume Shakespeare really did imbue it with every bizarre thread of subtextual meaning churned out over the intervening 400 y
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Radiative heat transfer at temperatures around room temperature (300 K) is about 6 W/(m^2K). For a CPU that is 10 cm2 that is allowed to be 50 K above environmental temperature, you would be able to radiate away around 0.3 watts, which is unpractical. If you could expose the CPU to the outside of the satellite, shaded from direct sunlight, it would see the 4 K background temperature in space and could radiate about 600 W/m^2, or about 0.6
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Vacuum is an excellent heat isolator. It's used in between double glassed windows for example.
No heat can get through unless it's radiating over the vacuum gap.
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No, it isn't, [wikipedia.org] at least not for regular cost-sensitive applications; they use argon or air. Vacuum insulated glass exists, but it has a lot of visible spacers between the glass panes to deal with the 10 tonnes per square meter (2000 lbs/sq ft) of atmospheric pressure.
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Which means it is used... our lab oven has one.
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Lack of air, or vacuum as it's better called, does not prohibit one from having fans in space, it simply prevents the fan from functioning as designed...
I mean, you still could launch one into space and spin it, for all the good it'd do you...
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suckers! I'll show you. I'll run my fan and laugh all the way to the edges of the galaxy when it creates propulsion by flinging space dust!
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Assume best Robert A. Heinlein voice: Even today people talk about "the bitter cold of outer space" -- but space is a vacuum, and if vacuum were cold, how could a Thermos jug keep hot coffee hot? Vacuum is nothing -- it has no temperature, it just insulates.
In other words, you lose some heat from radiation, but for substantial cooling you need something, like air for instance, to conduct the heat away.
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A perfect vacuum is at absolute zero. But the thing is there are no perfect vacuums - electromagnetic radiation for example traverses vacuums rather well and gives an effective equilibrium temperature to the not-so-perfect vacuum itself. Random EM radiation plus cosmic rays and solar wind is what makes the equilibrium temperature of a typical near earth vacuum about 4K instead of 0K.
If you want to measure this, you put a small thermometer into the appropriate test environment, wait a sufficiently long amou
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> It should be pointed out that the temperature and thermal conductivity are quite different. It is of course harder to heat up an object with poor thermal conductivity, but if you wait long enough both the highly conductive objects (like metal) and poorly conductive objects (like a near vacuum) will indeed reach equilibrium at the same temperature.
That is kind-of what I'm getting at. Vacuum is a poorly conductive object and a heat source, like active electronics in a satellite, release heat poorly in a
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fans move. everything u want a satellite not to do is to have an internal momentum which u would need to balance by energy using jets.
Exactly. What you'd really want then is to take advantage of the temperature difference between the hot satellite and cold space to drive a Stirling engine which would run a heatpump. Problem solved.
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So, you've applied power to a heat pump to extract heat from the cold side (where your CPU is) to the hot side. Now you have a hot side that needs something to do with all that heat, or your system will run away.
Well you can easily solve that one, you just need to add heat pumps all the way down.
Re:Before anyone else says it... (Score:5, Funny)
Or, rather, lack of Whoosh...
Re:Before anyone else says it... (Score:5, Funny)
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Excellent idea for overclocking (Score:2)
Just cut the heat pipe open, so that the heat will flow out of it instead of being trapped inside. Now you're getting way more cooling!
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Nah, that doesn't work, then you've got heat spilling out all over the floor. That's no good.
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Well, you've got a heat sink, a heat pipe... where's the heat toilet? It's probably backed up again.
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Cut a hole in the floor. Let the heat pour through it into the basement.
You can also set up a heat engine in the basement and use it to power the computer. The more heat you spill, the more power you'll generate, the faster your computer will be. No more electricity bills!
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You can't just dump the heat into the basement! That's heat pollution!
You need to dispose of it properly!
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Do this. Seriously, the EPA is the most evil of all gov't entities when you piss them off. The last thing you want to do is release heat emissions that contribute to global warming.
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A better idea is to cut open the processor itself, so that its insides are exposed to the cool air, instead of having all that hot metal covering it.
Actually, why do they use hot metal for heat sinks anyway??? There must be better metals... most metal things that I know are cold. Something inside the computer must be heating up the metal. If they detach the heatsink from the rest of the computer and thermally insulate it, it should stay a lot cooler and thus remain much more effective.
If they do all these t
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True story:
I once helped a friend with his computer. He had recently built a computer and was trying to overclock it, but the thing was severely overheating constantly, even when not overclocked. He asked me to look at his setup. I expected to see an unplugged fan, or maybe missing thermal paste or something.
Well, it turned out that he decided to get the most massive heatsink/fan combo he could for his Core i7 (they had just come out, I think) ... and it was just a hair too big for his case.
He cut off th
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lesson for today: don't use heatpipes on your laser printer:
/var/log/messages
% tail
...
lp0 on fire
damn.
gotta go, now!
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Tomcat just crashed
Well, at least it's not all bad!
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Guess I shouldn't use the floppy disks I have, they all date from around 1998.
Can you even buy floppies anymore?
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yes, more surface area
Cleaning? (Score:2)
It looks like it makes it easier to clean than the Zalman I currently have. The fan is in the center of a loop with the fins between the fan and the pipe so it's a little harder to get in and clean out the misc dust and cat hairs.
[John]
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Yeah, but it gets taken to class by that radial design in terms of ability to actually cool stuff.
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misc dust and cat hairs.
Perhaps categorized dust and cat hairs (maybe by length) would help?
Gandalf disapproves (Score:1)
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"He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."
Gandalf lived in a land of make believe with faeries and hobbits. He's off the path of reality!
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(completely disregarding the fact that the guy in TFA did, in fact, know what the thing was; he just wanted to find out what made it tick)
Where's the juice? (Score:3)
There's a working fluid there somewhere, it must have come out, and it might be toxic. Or it might give you a high. The review is silent on this.
Re:Where's the juice? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or it might just be water.
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Why exactly is a fluid necessary? I don't think there is a fluid.
Heat pipes work by evaporating a liquid at the hot end and condensing it at the cold end.. The fancy wicking stuff is to persuade the liquid to move back to the hot place to get evaporated again. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe [wikipedia.org] .
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Giant heatsinks are fun. I remember when I first strapped a Scythe Ninja to a Q6600. At first I was worried the case wouldn't close. Then I worried that the sheer mass of the thing (and both 120mm fans I strapped to it) would just pull the processor right out of it's socket. Then I closed the case and started to worry that I would never be able to open the thing again if it did fall off.
Fortunately, it never did break. And, of course, after about a year I ripped the puny stock HSF off the 8800GT (in the sam
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I've been using them in my custom rigs for years. Though they might be the size of a small child, their coolers have never let me down.
And as a bonus, unlike a small child they don't get tired from spinning the fans.
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Wouldn't the mercury expand and pop the heatpipe?
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Mercury has SHIT thermal conductivity, what are you talking about?
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/mercury-d_1002.html [engineeringtoolbox.com]
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Hey, sodium and potassium are only 60-70ish and they used those to make liquid nuclear reactors.
Mercury is still way better than air...
However, water is bad enough; how bad is it going to be when the mercury leaks out all over the mobo? :)
let alone sodium... :>
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Somebody ask for a 3D printed computer?
http://hackaday.com/2011/10/27/3d-printed-electromechanical-computer/ [hackaday.com]
Re:But how does it compare to a solid heatpipe? (Score:4, Informative)
They work much better. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe [wikipedia.org]
-Aaron
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Because running a device at 40-50 degrees Celsius below the Tmax will make it last longer than running it at 10 degrees below the Tmax. Heat eventually breaks down modern semiconductors.
Also, you want to avoid thermal processor throttling, which does not occur at an exact temperature. Giving yourself a lot of margin for error avoids that.
Last, you can get close to the same amount of cooling for about $40, which I consider a reasonable investment to help extend the life of a $300-600 processor.