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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 less 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!
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?
So we need more copper?
Yes! The only way to increase the surface is to build a higher tower!
lead to problems
We're talking about copper, dumdum.
Do you have any idea how expensive a solid block of copper that big is?
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.
Would you even notice, after buying the ram and storage?
Yes but you save on manufacturing.
Copper isn't that bad. It's not cheap exactly, but it's probably going to cost what an expensive CPU cooler already would.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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 😜
Why copper? Aluminum work 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.
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 part to improve dissipation. But maybe its all marketing.
Aluminium is significantly cheaper, that's why they make coolers with a copper base and alu fins. It's a good compromise.
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.