How to make a heatpipe-based cooling system on your own

   The heart of a noiseless computer is a heat remover. It is a device transferring the heat energy from processor to cooling radiator. Earlier the concept of home-made heat removers was plain. People fastened smeared with thermal paste pipes between two copper plaits. This method was doomed to failure, processor overheated or operated at its breaking point. The reason was plain, bad contact of heat pipes with copper heat remover. As a result less than 50% of their resource were used. In hand-made manufacture the coolers on heat pipes are not saved by any thermal paste because its capacity for heat transfer is 500 times less than copper’s one…
Our first fanless computers were made in the same way. I can’t recollect their modding without smiling. Their construction couldn’t provide normal functioning of the high-capacity processor. It could keep the acceptable temperature only of weakly Celeron, which was close to critical temperature however. More modern processors and all the more overclocking were out of the question…
   Having read this article, you’ll be able to make a device capable of cooling any high-capacity modern processor. Don’t be surprised, it will cool even an overclocked processor! Now you are able to make a silent computer without fans on your own. This system was tested on the top models of Intel and AMD families. The results are amazing. In all fairness I tell that such characteristics can be reached only when using a good radiator. But this is the subject of another article. We learned how to make radiators on our own as well…
So, let’s start. To make a cooler, we need several copper ingots and of course heat pipes. We’ve already written how and where you can get the heat pipes. That’s why we’ll pay more attention to copper ingots. Aluminium is not appropriate in this case. There are several reasons. First of all, its heat transfer coefficient is two times smaller than copper’s coefficient. Secondly, it’s difficult to solder it. We need copper namely. Pieces of a copper plate of 20-25 mm thickness will be optimal. We use them for our coolers on heat pipes.
In the beginning we must determine the concept of the cooler to be. It depends on what we’re going to cool. A heat exchanger consisting of two copper ingots and three 6 mm heat pipes will easily cope with low-capacity processors like P4 Celeron 3000 as well as high-power video adapters like X850.
 

   To cool processors like Prescott, Smithfield or Presler, we’ll need six heat pipes and three copper ingots for heat exchanging. Their construction is below. We didn’t test the new Conroe yet, so I can’t speak about them. These models were not yet in use when we performed the modding.