Fans in our high-powered PCs keep getting bigger and louder, since our high-powered CPUs and high-powered video cards keep pumping out more and more heat. And no matter how “silent” they’re advertised as being, four of five of them in one case will always make some noise. So what can you do? Liquid cooling is a possibility, but installation can be complicated and failure can be catastrophic. So why not go for a passive solution? Sure, it’s not quite as “effective,” but it’s incapable of making noise — kind of like my friend’s cat.
These big-ass heatsinks just sit on top of your CPU and just let the heat seep out at its own rate. They’re so big, though, that the heat always has somewhere to go and eventually what airflow you do have (I guess you can have a couple fans) will whoosh it right out the vents.
The problem is that these heatsinks, being enormous, are also super heavy. If you’ve got a side-mounted motherboard, and 99% of you do, it’s totally inadvisable to clamp one of these suckers on there, cause it’ll probably rip the CPU right out of its seat. However, if you’ve got a HTPC that sits on its side (yet has the depth to hold one of these monsters), it won’t be a problem. Just don’t reach in there and touch it, it’s hot and sharp.
[image credit and via: Tom's Hardware]
ya that good news , i am also being very frustrated when my cooling fan give heavy noise. Now i definitely change it.
Most aftermarket coolers have a back-plate mount as well, so they clamp down on the CPU rather than hang off it, regardless of the angle you hang them at (upside-down might be a bit of a problem from a cooling point of view, though), so a vertical mount is normally fine. In fact, the two pictured will work better with a vertical mount, since convection will cool the blades much more effectively if there’s a straight path upwards.
Passive cooling systems aren’t very popular for PC hobbyists these days because they always beg the question: “What if I added a fan to this?”
Look at those gigantic radiators and imagine how much more efficient they’d be with a fan blowing off the heat.
I just want to know who makes the Stargate looking one.
I’ve always wondered about this. The heatpipes in these coolers are hollow tubes with a working fluid that is supposed to be evaporated by the CPU heat and then condensed as they cool in the fins. That’s going to work very differently if you rotate the whole thing by 90 degrees, isn’t it? Are these things far more effective in one orientation than in another?
Pretty picture, interesting thought… but where’s the beef? There’s no pointer to real product.
I’d like to see some linkage here as well. I strapped a Tuniq Tower on an e8400 about a year ago, and the processor stays cool as a cucumber. Now if only the video cards didn’t insulate themselves near the bottom, I’d be set.
Enough of the butthurt over no linkage to actual products.
The article is a general commentary on passive cooling, not an article about a specific product.
Use google.
Toms Hardware sucks.