heat pipes...

[Dough1397]

alot of the new heat sinks have heat pipes... take teh xp-120, the bas of the heat sink has 5 pipes that bring it up higher.... now wouldnt a heat sink that was the sameas the xp120 without the heat pipes and was one piece be better?

transferring heat through chunks of copper/aluminum doesnt seem to effective to me.... how does it work so well?

 

[Operandi]

The heat pipes are hallow and contain liquid under low pressure. Once the liquid heats up it evaporates up to the top (coldest part of the heatsink) cools down and falls to the bottom of the heatsink and process repeats itself.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

. . . thus removing heat from the heatsink base through a cycle of phase change.

I confirm through personal experience that you can get the same cooling efficiency with heatpipes for less weight than a copper lump with fins.

Currently, I am using a Sunon KDE1212PMB1-6A 120x38mm fan to cool a ThermalRight XP120. The idle temperature is 26C and the load value is 38C with PRIME95. If I turn down my exhaust fans a tad, the load value climbs to 39 or 40. The system is currently over-clocked 20%. The numbers were observed under a 70F room ambient, or around 21C.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Dough1397
alot of the new heat sinks have heat pipes... take teh xp-120, the bas of the heat sink has 5 pipes that bring it up higher.... now wouldnt a heat sink that was the sameas the xp120 without the heat pipes and was one piece be better?

transferring heat through chunks of copper/aluminum doesnt seem to effective to me.... how does it work so well?

No, because the shape of the XP-120 requires that there be some method of heat transfer from the base up to the cooling fins.
The answer is... You can't get there from here.

 

[Dough1397]

re: blain
i mean the space inbetween the base and the to wide part would be like the same metal so it was just very fine slots of copper/aluminum coming up form the base?

 

[akira34]

The heatpipes are filled with a liuid that has a very low boiling point. As it gets heated, from the processor, it boils and moves up the pipe. It then transfers the heat to the fins, gets cooled, and flows back down to the base to repeat the process. Because the liquid boils at such a low temperature, it moves the heat to the rest of the heatsink much faster (and more efficiently) than just a hunk of metal could/would. This is one of the reasons why the heatpipes are used on laptop processors. Otherwise, you wouldn't see ANY laptops even close to the 1" thick mark, due to needing large heatsinks. They would also be a lot louder, since the fans would be larger as well. Either that, or the processors wouldn't be evne close to as fast as they are now.

 

[Dough1397]

ok that makes sense now that i think about it, thanks guys!