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Whatever happened to TMD fans?

etherealfocus

Senior member
Anyone else remember Y.S. Tech's Tip Magnetic Driver fans in the early 2000s? Wonder why they never caught on... I Googled it and found nothing but an old Wikipedia page linking to a review from 2001. Too bad. They seemed like a cool idea.
 
Funny, I was just thinking about those the other day when I found a broken one in an old box of parts. The only problem I had with them was that they only came in 70mm and didn't fit anything other than a few Vantec heatsinks. I'm certain they would have done better if they came in standard sizes. It was a cool idea I thought. They weren't especially quiet or wonderful or anything but they did have a neat look to them.
 
There was that. I remember a lot of predictions that 60 and 80mm sizes were coming soon but they never materialized. I wonder if TMD just became less important with the advent of horizontal fan mounts - the low flow zone wouldn't be in the hottest part of the heatsink anymore.

I actually had pretty good results back in the day from shaving about a 30-degree angle onto the top of my heatsink and mounting the TMD fan with hot glue. Not as good as a horizontal mount, but it definitely increased flow while keeping the high pressure zone right above the CPU.
 
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