Find our video on how heatpipes are made here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AD-4WKwCAfE.html We did a different video on the distantly related topic of heatpipe orientation on Zen 2 chiplets: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-O1WGlPrH4IU.html
What is the minimum temp in celsius that a heatpipe is effective? For example, If I pull cold arctic winter air through the cooler, at what temp does the benifit stop? (so to say. excuse my grammar. Aije ämm fråm Sviiidänn 🇸🇪)
Glad to see you tried a direct contact heat pipe cooler. I can't even imagine how much work went into this! Thank you for all you do. One thing that still makes me wonder is if the orientation of direct contact heat pipes matter is: if the heatpipes are lined up parallel or perpendicular with die would that change performance? I remember you mentioning in the previous video that it shouldn't matter due to the IHS and the coldplate, but in this instance there would be no coldplate. (I think testing with a non-soldered vs soldered chip would bring different results due to the thermal transfer properties from both. (for something with multiple chiplets this might not matter much if all, and the same could be said for single chiplet style too) but I'm thinking more specifically of intel's more "traditional", if you will,(or more common) single chiplet like dies. Perhaps it's not worth the time to consider, but if it is it would make for another very interesting and very educational video. (Although given your results thus far... The likeliness of any meaningful change is quite slim to non-existent). Just a thought and thank you again for all your hard work!! Have a happy new years!
@@newgame2day I'd like to see LTT try something like this. *Sarcastic* (not to bash on LTT, because that are great! But I don't think they would go nearly as in depth or even take something like this on. Although they have done some tests(like their positive/negative/neutral air pressure test) that are pretty interesting, I just don't believe their audience would appreciate, or care as much about something like this... I could be wrong, and would love to see it happen, but for a channel that big, and with so many other things going on, I just don't foresee them doing this topic... But I guess that's part of the charm that is Gamers Nexus they are willing to cater more to deep dive in odd topics such as *heat pipe orientation*) :)
I will say, the results are somewhat counterintuitive, especially if you ever actually tried that wicking experiment. wicking from one cup to another is so incredibly slow, it is surprising wicking alone can actually move enough coolant. Great vid Steve and crew. B)
Sc0ttishGamer88 Sublimation only works so long as you have enough coolant to Subliment for the duration of the mission. Craft like New Horizons and SOHO are a tad beyond that mission time capacity.
@@ramheyhey Cool story. We'll just say that for any questions our viewers have: "Why don't you just read a book?" That's super helpful, right? All data that ever needs to exist to answer questions must already exist, so there's no point to contributing more.
@@GamersNexus Herein lies the often overlooked fact that just having knowledge and being able to parse it and apply it are two wildly different things!
Your strictly methodical approach in tests like this is highly appreciated. When ever watching such videos from you one can take the result and use it for own builds without questioning their solidity. This is a big help as certain variables just can be put aside and focusing on the relevant parameters of the build makes work faster and leads to better results within a given time. Thanks for your great work on such basics!
The best reason why people should be a patreon. I could not find anything better then GN and decided to support them for 5$/month. I want to see more of detailed content after all.
The copper powder is important because it serves as a threatening reminder to the heat pipe tube of what it will be made into if it doesn't behave and transfer heat well. This fear is what makes them so good at transferring thermal energy.
They'd probably make him tie it up, just because it otherwise might take over the cabin, and fly them into a giant graphite-like monolith. "What are you doing, Steve?"
I always love the idea of having the motherboard facing the floor, natural protection against water leaking given the low pressure tubes hold and also easy to spot when they do. Just need to have the water reserve mounted on top of all components (no issue).
For someone that Brazes Copper and Aluminium for Transformer Coils for the last 40 Years Capillary action is a way of life! Considering how well copper transfers heat on it's own, I'm surprised that there is a need for the heat pipes to have such an elaborate design needing copper powder, a drop of water and then vacuum sealed to assist in the Capillary action! I honestly didn't know this!! Learn something new everyday! Thanks Steve!
I found this video only now after all these years! Great content and you should consider wearing a shirt with "I 🖤 scientific method"! This video should be linked from the description of every heat pipe cooler you test!
Thank you Steve! - i asked about this a year or two ago and you answered it directly during an "ASK GN". Was great to see it revisited and fully investigated. curiosity settled for good. (and you were bang on the money back then too)
What an amazing explanation, really deep and thorough on how the pipes work, can't really find anything like this anywhere else, as well as the testing. You've outdone just about everyother cooler testing I've ever seen, thanks
Respect! Thanks to GN for taking the time to test this and presenting the results. I really appreciate your effort to keep us informed! Happy New Year to everybody@GN! 🥂😎
You could use a clamp style Mini Pipe Cutter to cut those pipes without evaporating the insides. They sell them right where you buy copper pipes for your house in the hardware store. Some are large but you can get one that is only a couple inches in size for the smaller pipes like Brake Lines
The reason there was no difference is that even in upside-down orientation, you didn't reach the heat transfer limit of the heatpipes. If you further increase the wattage, you'll see a sudden breakpoint, which depends on orientation. This does not matter for computer-end-users though, because they will never reach those wattages and even if we're talking about overclocking, it doesn't make sense, because the condenser on the cooler is too small anyway.
Great video Steve! Also, love the rgb ram wreath on the wall. So festive. Your videos are like a Futurama episode. You notice more things the more you watch.
Love the info. While I had a basic understanding of heat pipes, in the end, I just resorted to classifying it as magic. This helped clear some of the misconceptions. Thank you for the video! :)
Edit: oh man i'm stupid. i didn't mean the memory kit in the actual bench system (i did ignore it because thats just an insult for the eyes). i mean the display kit that is seen araound 15:48 in the background 3rd shelf from top, in front the big motherboard pcb and next to the rx 57000 xt waifu editon. @@asit6947 nope thats the gigabyte aorus ddr 4 3200 kit 2x8 gig. that kit is almost now a year avaible? i'm waiting for the new one because its realy decent looking and has a really low profile. i have the aorus x570 xtreme and the black is almost the same so really nice looking. it has rgb but i find it not so obnoxious and it will be turned off
Time to strap a thermosyphon heatpipe to a CPU. Since they aren't having any sintered material or groves. They are though more intended to provide cooling in only one orientation. Commonly used for keeping permafrost frozen in areas where there is a source of heat, like the Alaskan oil pipeline. But one shouldn't underestimate the effectiveness of water creeping over a surface towards dryer areas. And one should also not underestimate the rather insane amount of energy needed to heat and boil water.... Though, one thing that has long poked my curiosity is heatpipe saturation. Since the vacuum inside a heat pipe lowers the boiling point of the water inside it, so if the cold side were to get heated above that temperature, the performance of the heatpipe should logically diminish. So what temperature does different heatpipes/coolers saturate at? Not saying that testing this would be easy. Though, a thermal chamber kept at a fixed temperature and slowly dialing it up and watching the delta temperature between the CPU and the air in the chamber should be somewhat informative. Though, I would skip using a CPU and just use a large resistor and a K-type thermocouple to read its temperature. Since then one can always apply a constant amount of power for one to keep cool. Though, a constant air speed would also be needed.
If i got you right, and this could to a few handful of customers, be a real problem, it should be at about 80-120c become a problem. It's the only real flaw with this video but could be avoided entirely by the customer if they also keep their rig NOT upside down as far as i can remember. I was looking at max temperature cooling notes for heat pipes over a large chunk of last year and this year. Some of the whitepapers and notes detailed that it's often a risk to stop the entire liquid functionality of dragging heat away if you overstep the designated max temperature. Basically, GN never tested a CPU that is running hot enough for long to realize this environment. So for all normal users, it's not relevant. But to the few that got a bad case, with an Intel CPU going hot hot hot at it!.... You are in rare cases getting close to this limit and i'd imagine that the cooler would become a lot worse suddenly at above 100c and just make the cpu choke and undervolt/clock as we know they do. But again that's why your test would make more sense for that sort of test. And don't even try to ask me about those pictures, i went trough so much random stuff it wasn't even funny.
@@CYellowan Though, you would also need an abhorrently poorly ventilated case for the heatpipes to saturate. After all, we need the whole heatpipe to be warm enough for the water inside to not be liquid, even on the cold side. But that is where this actually gets interesting. A heatsink with little surface area on the cold side would have a greater delta C/W compared to a heat sink with more surface area. (Though, oversimplifying here.) So theoretically we could heat the warm side of a heat sink sufficiently for its heat pipes to force the cold side to a temperature that is above the condensing point of the heatpipe. Though practically, a heatpipe has rather abhorrent thermal conduction by itself. Ie without any water inside it. So to get enough heat to flow through a saturated heat pipe to keep the cold side that warm would likely require the warm side to be fairly ridiculously warm. (But I haven't tested.) But, as we approach this edge case, then our thermal performance would start to deteriorate. Ie, for every 1 watt added, we would see a progressively larger amount of delta C added for this additional power, at steady state power draw, there is thermal mass after all... Though, there is also the other side of heatpipes. Since a heatpipe gets its performance from boiling water, then we need to reach that temperature for it to have its impressive thermal conduction. So when a CPU idles at low power, then it will still be at a fairly decent temperature, and as it ramps towards higher power draw, we shouldn't expect any major increase in temperature. Except, we have multiple thermal junctions, and material for the heat to flow through, and water doesn't boil at a fixed temperature, but rather starts simmering away already at lower temperatures... So the graph would likely be smoothed out a fair bit. Though, likely having a y=tan(x) shape to its delta-C/power graph. (Power on the x axis, temperature on the y.) Though, the thing would likely have offsets in both X and Y, and have a different scale. Exact location and values of cores dependent on the specifications of the heatpipe. But this is just rough back of the envelope dead reckoning. Though, in the end, the slope of the middle section of the graph and the two points at which it gets steeper could logically vary from one heatsink to another. So the question then quickly becomes, how would one test these heat sinks? I myself would graph their thermal performance. But since the thermal performance is 3 dimensional. (warm side temp, cold side temp, and power. If we have fixed air speed... So that is a 4th dimension to our graph...) Then this gets a bit hard to just show in a video...
> Since the vacuum inside a heat pipe lowers the boiling point of the water inside it, so if the cold side were to get heated above that temperature, the performance of the heatpipe should logically diminish. Heating increases the pressure inside the heat pipe. If the manufacturer did a good job removing air from the pipe, the boiling point of the water will always be close to the current operating temperature. There are physical limits but they're quite broad. At low temperature, the coolant can freeze at the condenser. This happens below the "triple point temperature," 0.01 C for water. From what I understand this is rarely a problem for electronics because even if you start your electronics in a very cold environment (-40 C), by the time you need phase change cooling, enough heat will be conducted through the copper to melt the water. This effect does mean that you can't expect heat-pipes to work effectively with liquid nitrogen. At high temperature, the phase-change effect slowly becomes weaker. It disappears at or beyond the critical point: 374 C for water and about 3200 PSI. I found some information from manufacturer ACT. They say their water-cooled pipes work well between 60C and 200C. The ideal temperature depends on the amount of adverse height, it's about 150C for a level heatpipe. It's an interesting graph. Heatpipe capacity approximately doubles between 30C and 90C, and it falls off even faster if you try to go below room temperature. www.1-act.com/water-heat-pipe-parameters-and-limitations/#operatingtemperature
@@jordanrodrigues8265 Yes, a temperature increase would mean more of the water is a gas, and therefor increase the pressure, that would in turn increase the boiling point a bit. After all, it is a fairly small enclosed space. Though, it is also not much water in it. But having just finished writing my other book of a comment, I can see that the link you provided has a graph showing a very similar thermal behavior to what I already outlined. Though, expressed differently. The one in the link has power on the Y axis, while my proposed graph would have delta C. But in the end, it is the same thing, seen from different sides. Like frame times and FPS...
Excellent video, no one else goes this in-depth. I've been really pleased with the giant noctua TR cooler, definitely not going back to AIO water, they just don't hold consistent temps for 8+ hour renders.
Anecdotally, I tested this on my previous laptop. I has been long enough ago that I can't recall all the details, but I tested it multiple times in all six orientations, and all but one worked equally well. However, that last one orientation was not just outside of error, but the difference was extreme; almost all cooling performance was gone and the CPU had to throttle within seconds of me putting it under load. I don't recall exactly what orientation it was, but the heat-pipe in the laptop was mostly linear, and I'm fairly sure it was one of the two orientations in which the heat-pipe itself was vertical.
I observed very similar behaviour in Clevo W230SS - it was mostly ,but if you raised back of laptop so it makes about 45 degrees or higher, pufff, whole cooling is gone and even modest CPU activity was leading to 90 C. AFAIR I did find similar complaints for W230S* family in couple forums.
Interesting to know heat pipes go back to the 1960s or longer. I had never heard of them until 2007 when I got my first CPU cooler with heat pipes. Now tower coolers are common but back then it was the first I had seen with most coolers before then being small and horizontal.
so those interested in heat pipe technology there is a form of heat pipe technology called oscillating heat pipes. They offer greater performance over standard heatpipes. They is a company producing them called thermavant. and while they are still expensive now to make with the ever decreasing process node and the increase of heat in a given area i really wouldnt be too shocked if these became more common over the next few years in higher end coolers for both cpu and gpu
Wow I'm super impressed that you guys could reassemble the heat pipes and THEN test with good results. That takes some skill to do! Good content GN! (oh and I'm joking btw wheres sarcasm font when you need it?)
Hey Steve, I just watched your test, and I sort of wished you tested the coolers with the just the ends of the heatpipes tips cut off. Sometimes I wonder if they even need capillary action to work.
@@bothellkenmore I am not so sure that they perform any better than a oversized passive heatsink. I've seen large transformers that have more power ran through them, yet passively cooled.. Also Seasonic has a 600 watt passively cooled power supply... So this makes me wonder about some claims
@@silverstangs You'd have to use an awful lot of copper to outperform them. If there was a better way (cost/performance) the market would have produced it. CPU's and PSU's are completely different too. In a lot of PSU's now the fan won't even spin until under load because of the efficiency of the components and efficiency directly correlates to heat generation.
I just put in my thermalright axp-100, and even though I was very dubious of it, seeing the noctua docs I made sure to not have the pipes pointing down. Thanks for dispelling my ignorance, and maybe ask for comment from noctua too?
Because some people are still running mechanical HDD's, i think there is more to the orientation than "whatever works best for your space". I've seen warnings not to run hdd's in certain orientations, like upside down. This may be something to consider here.
@@GamersNexus I fully realize that, but you did not mention them as a consideration when telling people they can align their desktop computers however they want at the end of the video in your conclusions. Even though this wasn't about HDD's, it could warrant mention since that is a potential hazard of odd orientations.
Specific to laptops, upside down is extremely common. Usually the CPU die is face down with the cooling solution closer to the bottom of the laptop case.
D15 is amazing. It runs idle unless the cpu hits 60c. Which happens only while baking or doing any other heavy compute stuff.Wish I waited for zen2. Soldered 7nm cpu+d15 would be a hella good pair.
Their goal is maximum heatpipe surface area contact to the silicon, which is often best achieved (with minimal gaps between pipes) with 6mm solutions that remain more cost effective. On some of the big die GPUs, you will more commonly see 8mm (or rarely 10mm) heatpipes.
From data sheets I've seen 6mm pipes perform well, aren't restricted like 3 and 4mm ones are, and there isn't as much of an improvement to 8mm. Also, larger diameter pipes are more difficult to bend and have worse transfer to the fin arrays compared to using more, smaller, 6mm pipes.
@@davidgunther8428 I'm guessing it has to do with the surface to volume ratio. The bigger the diameter of the pipe the bigger the ratio between surface area and internal volume. This works out when you have to transfer really large amounts of heat but for something like a CPU cooler ít's not optimal.
I would say cost is the reason, there's a factory out there making heatpipes some beancounter will work out going to 8mm over 6mm will add X to the cost, if we need to we can use 2 or 3 6mm pipes and the larger volume will drop the unit price, the basic concept is well known, its just do we need 2 or 3 pipes, how many fins and how tall. The whole episode here is probably more intensive reseach than most compaines will do.
Ole Silverstone has maintained that GPU heatpipe orientation for their inverted board cases like the FT-02 and such need to not-be horizontal(like most seem to be). I've spent years going out of my way to find GPU's that match what they recommend. They site the same theory initially proposed, that with the heat source way above the condenser end of the heat pipe it could cause problems. I'm not more tempted to test that advice for myself.
Late to the party but as someone who spent part of their college coursework working specifically in satellite work this is fascinating considering how much we agonized over exactly how to best accomplish cooling with the limited size envelope we had back then.
You know a meaningful result test would be the vrm cooling provided by the CPU cooler. Often people remove the air flow which was part of the board design for board cooling. I would expect a fin orientation would make a difference to flow, down to the board or over it.(above).
You should run a test where you perforate a heat pipe and let the internal liquid evaporate out. Do this to see what the phase change/evaporation cooling effect is vs conductivity of the copper pipe @ those temperatures. Would be an interesting test I think also. Great Videos
Science!!! Just an OT-ish thought... I sometimes wonder if upside-down mounting might interact negatively with board-flex due to mounting pressure. i.e., conceivably, upside-down orientation could ameliorate board-flex-related stress on PCB soldier joints and, consequently, improve the effectiveness of the board as a last-resort heat-sink and board longevity. Probably, H0 ought to be "no relationship;" but, I wonder if some board/cooler combinations might have stronger correlations, i.e. sockets with bigger packages. Hard thing to test rigorously, I suspect. Regardless, it's nice to learn/confirm that, in the short run, at least, for air CPU cooling, there's little point worrying about orientation! Great work.
Just when I thought "well, the only use case where upside-down heatpipes might actually occur for me are my laptop. Good to know it doesn't matter!" you go and say "oh well, the only case where it might matter would be a really confined space.... like a laptop."
I absolutely love how thorough and scientific the testing is on this channel. When GN says something, there is a sound, reproducible, control tested test to back it up.
The liquid at the block vaporises and the pressure forces the rest of the liquid to disperse evenly across the entire surface area. This means there is a continual 'stream' where the gas is condensing, and the liquid is forced along the surface area to the block, where it vaporises again. As such the orientation doesn't matter, as the momentum is driven by the pressure, not by gravity. There would have to be a huge pressure differential for gravity to matter. What Steve should do is run a cooler with a progressive number of heat pipes cut open!
you kind of answered the thesis with an example of 0 g heatpipe usage, space exploration, if they were sensitive to how they are orientated in relation to the centre of mass then a satelite would be innefectively cooled unless orientated with the heatsource towards the center of mass
I remember doing an engineering report on heat pipes. Now, I use them exclusively for computer builds. Well, before the report, I had a hard time justifying a AIO for anyone's computer outside of systems that needed that additional thermal mass of the water.
Hey thanks again for doing these awesome and incredibly thorough vids. Do you know if any other liquids have been used other then water? Did you ever hear back from Deep Cool about your observations of the missing interior grooves? Did they just not expect anyone to open one and call them about their fib?
Hey guys, I noticed that on some of your results, you didn't report error bars on the upside-down position. Not sure if that was a mistake or intentional. I'm a little concerned about the error bars on these tests in general, and where they're coming from. They don't really seem to fluctuate with the underlying values, which is a little odd. If you're just reporting error based on the precision of your measuring device, then some statistical inference would give you more confidence by averaging the error. If you're reporting error bars using a population average and standard deviation, that's probably not the best way to handle the data for a limited number of tests. That potentially discards useful information, and it makes the results very sensitive to population sampling bias. From a UQ perspective, the testing error is an unknown quantity that you would expect to be well-correlated between similar tests, so variance in one of these orientations and locations would inform variance in the other orientations. Using a Bayesian approach and having some prior normal distribution, you can then update it with each new test you run. The more tests of one type you perform, the more certain you can be about what your expected variation is, and the less information you need to collect from your population to validate that.
@GamersNexus, my old laptop would steadily climb to 95c and sit there until it eventually couldn't throttle any longer and shut down if i had the laptop with the base in a vertical position with the front of the laptop pointing upwards. Vertical orientation with the back of the laptop toward the top, it performed better than being in normal flat. To either side didn't affect much though.
The orientation of a c type cooler does matter, such as at 19:50. I had a phanteks cooler like that and I transferred to a different case that had the mobo upside down, and it overheated horribly! If I layed the case on its side it would be fine.
