Bro is flaunting their wealth. TWO whole sticks of RAM.
I hear this is what the inside of those flock cameras contain.
And free meth.
The Thermolith!
Copper is actually ~25-250X leas efficient at transferring heat than a heat pipe and convection is hundreds of times more efficient than radiation at transferring heat and the fins on a heat sink would have hundreds of times more surface area for dissipating heat all that is to say this might work but it would be orders of magnitude less efficient than a standard heat sink.
But without this ridiculous heatsink, we never would have gotten the most perfectly nerdy Lemmy post.
And to give it credit, I think this design wins for how much heat you can sink into the heatsink itself before you need somewhere else to put it!
It might? The only thing is that Heat pipes still transfer heat faster than copper and the air from the fan moves the heat faster than it travels through the copper, the only question is is that enough faster to make up for the speed it takes to transfer the heat from the fins into the air that is all technically radiative and thus slow but it’s only hundreds of times slower and as I already said the heat sink would be orders of magnitude faster so I doubt it.
Oh I don’t doubt that it would suck at it. It would just hold a lot of the heat within itself, eventually, lol.
Yeah, but won’t it also be much cheaper than machined, branded stuff?
Considering you can get a half decent tower cooler from aliexpress for like $10, probably not.
That’s the joke.
I assume the joke was either how expensive or how heavy it would be.
Heat pipes are fucking magic and you can’t convince me otherwise
PHASE CHANGE IS LIFE
I am in my 40s and almost every day it still pops back into my head how freaking amazing it was in high school chemistry watching water in the beaker above the bunsen burner stay the same temperature while all that damn energy went into the phase change.
I also have a pond in my back yard as a hobby. The ice has pretty much all melted now, after a lot built up during the very cold weather we had a while back. But holy hell, I started up the waterfall pump while there was still ice in places but water could flow. I had big slabs of ice that were in MOVING water and did not melt for DAYS because the water was almost the same temperature. It looked wrong, but the energy just wasn’t there to do otherwise.
Water moving is much better at removing heat than heat pipes could ever imagine. It depends on how fast the mass of water is moving.
What do you think heat pipes contain? Basically the same thing as water cooling systems.
Water cooling is basically a misnomer - it’s basically a heat relocation system that that gets the heat moved to what are usually air coolers that pass the heat off into the air. If the airflow in your PC is ideal and smart enough, no need for water cooling, you can air cool at the source at nearly the same efficiency, no need for a pump. It’s not as easy to manage in terms of space, but it has less maintenance issues.
I mean to say that a heat pipe not only contains less water per unit area for the phase changing cycle, since its under vacuum, but also the cycle only works at a particular heat per unit volume and temperature range. If you go past the temp range you get runaway.
Water in an active cycle has an almost unlimited ability to relocate heat. You still need to give that heat to something else, but you can pass a kilo of water thru a tiny labyrinth of fins at the heat source and a large surface area radiator with fan on the heat sink side. Vs a few ounces of water trapped inside a pipe running as a heat engine basically. Active pumping is brute force. At some point you won’t be able to contain the water pressure if your source is too hot, but there are many different working fluids.
Its irritating when we try designing a new cooling system at work and some guy will always want a heat pipe when clearly there is only a narrow band where those things are effective. Specially annoying if you don’t have control over the heat source. If you did have control over the source, then maybe you can tune it for a heat pipe. Car engines don’t have heat pipes. Solar collectors don’t use heat pipes either for the most part. Heat pipes need a constant source of heat that always stays below their max bandwidth.
I feel the need to point out that water cooling has an upper limit as well. If you get things hot enough, the water is going to flash into steam, at which point it’s going to decimate whatever system it’s in.
You can add additives to prevent that, but at some point it’s no longer “water”.
Reading this back, I suppose this is pedantism. But still.
Yeah, you control the flashpoint via pressure. the higher the pressure, the higher the temperature. However at some point it makes more sense to use a molten salt, an oil or a liquid metal to transport heat away.
If the temperature is near 20C to 100C there’s nothing like flowing water.
It doesn’t work for a lot of things, but your PC is basically a couple of flat panels where a lot of heat produced is localized to the GPU and CPU and it is potentially very easy to maintain a directed airflow close to them. A heatsink is basically good enough for that, and almost every GPU incorporates one, even the 5090’s, even though the airflow design usually sucks for all of them because of how generic it is. Speaking of car engines, you can go a step better and precisely control the airflow to get great cooling results just with air cooling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cehXZftIYok
I see your point, but if it works nearly as well, why go for a costlier solution that requires more maintenance and lasts less when it doesn’t require it?
I’m pretty sure the way heat pipes move heat is with water funny enough
Phase changing water
Yup, phase changing. Water in vacuum has to touch the heat source, evaporate, travel to the cooler side, condense and start over. As soon as your heat source prevents the cooling from happening, the cycle stops and it over heats. Like there’s a point at which the water can’t cool the source because its overwhelming.
Well someone’s gotta link [email protected]
Looks nice. Why they don’t sell PCs with cooling like that? What are the downsides?
I would guess that the low surface area would lead to problems. At first it would cool very well because of the huge thermal mass, but once it reaches thermal equilibrium the cooling would be quite weak.
I’d also think moving your PC will rip your CPU right off the motherboard
The trick is not to move the PC, but rather the copper block, which just happens to have a PC attached to it.
So, you’re saying that putting blocks of copper on everything in a PC will automatically shed unnecessary parts, building a more efficient system?
Just run a solid copper block for maximum efficiency.
Wouldn’t gold be more efficient? Can’t I just fill my PC with gold doubloons? The rattling noise means it’s running.
So we need more copper?
Theoretically… Hell yes!
Yes! The only way to increase the surface is to build a higher tower!
lead to problems
We’re talking about copper, dumdum.
how long till it reaches thermal equilibrium? maybe it can endure a full load for an hour
Your mom can endure a full… oh never mind.
You’re looking at about a half hour per kilogram of copper to raise it by 50 °C with 100W of heat.
Actual delta from ambient to thermal limit will typically be a little higher than that, but so is processor wattage on mid-to-high performance CPUs, so I’m happy enough with that as a ballpark estimate.
Someone else estimated that block as 4.5kg, so you’ve got something close to two and a half hours of cooling from an ambient start.
I was wondering about this too, but I’m not an engineer so I would have to look up how to calculate this
Do you have any idea how expensive a solid block of copper that big is?
What’s a solid block of copper cost? one banana?
Would you even notice, after buying the ram and storage?
If that block is roughly 4.5cm x 4.5cm x 25cm then the volume of it is about 500cm³ which translates to 4.5kg of copper. At 11€/kg that makes about 50 euros.
Cheaper than some noctua coolers.
If this were in an enclosure, would it cause the PCB to bow over time?
Yes but you save on manufacturing.
Despite the cost, it’s damn heavy.
and just stupid. Cooling fins of aluminum work better.
Copper isn’t that bad. It’s not cheap exactly, but it’s probably going to cost what an expensive CPU cooler already would.
but a CPU cooler will work better because it is active.
Well, yeah. Even a passive CPU cooler would probably work better.
Probably around $150 worth of copper there, but you’ll have to spend about twice that to get it because it comes in a larger size you’ll have to cut down.
11 euro per kilogram
My guess is that will only work until it saturates with heat. Some liquid cooling setups are also like that, where the rad isn’t capable of dissipating heat fast enough to prevent the whole thing from overheating, but it’ll work fine for a while because the loop itself can absorb a bunch of heat before it stops being able to take any more. Then they probably blame the chip maker for running too hot even with liquid cooling when their liquid cooling setup is actually less effective than the stock cooler or their case has horrible airflow and would choke any size or number of rads. But their reservoir acts as a heat buffer, so it takes 30 mins to even realize that, but they’ve already concluded it works.
And sometimes that even would be a good strategy for cases where there’s only short burst of higher heat output.
Weight, cost, and it’s probably not effective for the long haul. The mass of a copper ingot like that will work like a heatsink, but it has a very low surface area for the energy it can absorb. So it’ll heat up to a point that is uncomfortable for the CPU, then fail to radiate that energy out to the air effectively.
As a test-bench temporary heatsink, this is actually kind of inspired. No fans, to fussy clips, just stack a copper brick on the CPU, run some benchmarks, and then turn it all off.
I have a micro ATX case that itself is the cooler. Heatpipes transport the heat to the case walls and they have fins to increase surface area. It can handle up to 65 watt CPUs.
It’s not produced anymore. But with all the talk of the Gabecube I’ve been itching to make a new build with it. Unfortunately I have neither the money or the energy.
Fanless cases are a thing, and they’re neat.
they use aluminum as a heat sink and heat transfer medium.
Incredibly unwieldy. Real quick estimate of volume puts that at around 1.75kg of copper, so it wouldn’t be possible to mount in a vertical PC case orientation (ie the majority of consumer PC cases) without significant (expensive) modifications to both the mobo socket mount and the case, else its weight would snap the motherboard, or just slowly flex it until traces failed.
It may not even be able to be used vertically like that for very long or it will compress and damage the CPU / socket / mobo. Just as an example, the weight limit of the thermal solution (HSF/water chamber heatsink/etc) for socket LGA 1700 is 950g.
Real quick estimate of volume puts that at around 1.75kg of copper
I assume it’s at least ~5 cm × 5 cm × 15 cm. Given the mass density of copper, 8.96 g/cm^3 , its mass is at least 3.36 kg.
i find your estimate to be overed
It begins with the question: How wide is the cpu?
Based on that dimension, it’s approximately 3× as tall.
(if you notice the space bar, i think it’s a tiny computer)
I’d say, the copper block is ~3 USB connectors wide
i’d say about 2, @2.4 cm total then…
125 mm
They do sell gigantic heat sinks like that, but they have coils to dissipate heat properly. And the ones for a gaming computer are practically the size of the computer case itself.
Copper is actually ~25-250X leas efficient at transferring heat than a heat pipe and convection is hundreds of times more efficient than radiation at transferring heat and the fins on a heat sink would have hundreds of times more surface area for dissipating heat all that is to say this might work but it would be orders of magnitude less efficient than a standard heat sink.
This is a lot easier than running a line out to the swimming pool.
Am I blind? What’s that card in the PCIE slot?
Looks like a PCIE to NVMe. You can see a short M.2 slot on the board, but that drive is wayyyy too big for it
Thinking those M.2-22110 meant for servers (with ECC chip?)
This poor jpeg has aliased edges it’s so scuffed. I can’t tell if it’s an old SSD, an old photo…or none of the above.
Why is the motherboard resting on a towel??
When I work on stuff with tiny parts, it helps to do it on a towel. If you drop something, it tends not to bounce too far, things don’t roll as much, etc., and it’s easy to see stuff on a white towel.
I’d guess it’s the anti-static bag that one of the components came in. That said, the kind of person who has a copper heatsink probably also has a load-bearing towel.
They don’t want to scratch up their desk with the solder joints on the back of it? I’d normally use cardboard, but a towel probably works too 🤷
Or maybe it just has muddy paws that need toweling off 😜
OP is a hoopy frood.
Why copper? Aluminum works way better as a dissipation surface.
Copper has more mass, heat capacity, and thermal conductivity per litre.
Is aluminium actually more effective as a dissipation surface? I hadn’t heard that.
Copper is better conductor but it’s worse at dissipation. Do the experience yourself, heat a block of each and then touch them afterwards.
The problems and complications with your method:
- Suppose Cu is much faster at heat transfer and you only briefly touched it. Your skin does not actually sense temperature, but rate of heat transfer, which depends not only upon the material temperature but also upon how well it will transfer heat. Better use a thermometer.
- As explained in https://lemmy.nz/comment/20463232, you need to make sure both have been given the same amount of thermal energy and not just heated upto the same temperature. The best way to do so, is by embedding a heat generator right in the middle of the block and transferring a measured amount of energy. e.g. You can embed an electric heater wire (you will require insulation too. That’s your headache (ceramic, perhaps)) and pass current using a power source that gives a measurement of the total energy.
Is that not because the copper holds more heat, so stays hot for longer at the same dissipation?
Maybe you’re right, but I remember than in the 2000s I’ve had identical cpu heatsinks in both copper/aluminum versions, and the aluminum one had better performance. And then they started to make hybrid ones, stating that the copper part was to allow rapid heat transference and the aluminum parts to improve dissipation. But maybe it was all marketing.
Aluminium is significantly cheaper, that’s why they make coolers with a copper base and alu fins. It’s a good compromise.
I just thought of another reason for using Al this way.
Since the heat is being transferred to air, which would be much slower than the 2, using larger fins with lesser thermal conductivity might be more desirable than smaller fins with higher conductivity.
This would also be accompanied with other design changes like greater fin-fin gap, which is better for use with lower pressure fans.
So overall cheaper design and lesser noise.
Of course one could still use Copper fins with the same design for marginal performance increase, at the cost of more weight.
Aluminium is cheaper and lighter.
This seems to suggest that the metal-air transmission is virtually identical between the two, and cites some sources: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/255731/copper-or-aluminum-heatsink
Dissipation = thermal conductivity. Copper is better in both, it’s just heavier and far more expensive. Are you sure you put the same amount of energy into both blocks there? A copper heatsink can generally be much smaller than an aluminium one.
Technically, copper is better at heat dissipation. Aluminum is prefered because it’s cheaper and lighter. For an aluminum heat sink, you could have an smaller equally performing copper heat sink. In fact, this is the case for when weight and cost isn’t a priority. Some heatsinks even use a copper core to wick away heat to the rest of the aluminum heat sink.
From what I have always understood, copper is technically better, but it isn’t dramatically better and it is heavier and more expensive. You likely couldn’t make a heatsink like the full sized Noctua’s and just mount them the way we do because of the weight alone. The price would also likely be double to triple.
O nice, nog 'n Suid-Afrikaner. Ek sien daar’s baie van ons op Piefed. Hoe het jy van Piefed uitgevind?
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