I have read that AMD uses Liquid-chamber cooling technology which AMD says is an improvement over Vapor Chamber cooling, for use with their 7900 card.

Supposedly Liquid-chamber cooling technology-Vapor Chamber cooling is a much improved over heat pipes currently in use.

So if it is good enough for a GPU, what about CPU?

Is there a scythe or thermalright or thermaltake Vapor Chamber cooling CPU? Hopefully one can have a CPU cooled passively

The vapor chamber is nothing but a fat heat pipe. I recollect that there is one cpu cooler that uses one, but I can't remember who it is. Maybe it was Zalman? I don't believe it has any inherent strengths or benefits over other types of designs. But I would welcome anyone who might correct me or elaborate.

Here we go, it was Intel:
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.c ... cleID=2278

Also see:
http://www.frostytech.com/permalinkArch ... wsID=34103
http://www.heatsinkfactory.com/dynatron-g218.html
http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/show ... hp?p=85323
http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/show ... stcount=27

thanks.
A fat heat pipe might work better? just as copper over AL?

I think it is only useful if you are making a short cooler... that's why it is being used on video cards. The top CPU cooler manufacturers don't use them and there is likely a good reason they don't.

the article below, cool master claims their combo of vapor and heat pipes outperforms low-end water cooling

http://www.slashgear.com/cooler-master- ... -20210196/

There is always a battle in the computer world to get faster processors and to be able to dissipate the heat that the processors produce. When you get into an enthusiast class machine where a geek is overclocking you end up with even more heat to deal with. Some folks don’t like to go to liquid cooling or more exotic methods of cooling; they want reliable and simple air cooling.

Cooler Master is showing off a new breakthrough in air cooling technology that uses a heatsink with new vertical vapor chamber technology. The Vapor Chamber tech has less than half the air resistance of normal finned heatsink thanks to no airflow vortices created as the air is moving through the heatsink. Cooler Master doesn’t show a fan in the images, presumably the heatsink still needs a fan.

They also have three times the fin area to allow for quicker and more efficient dissipation of heat. The new tech gives heatsink that are able to offer cooling performance over 200W at the same or lower levels of noise than heatsink that don’t use vapor chambers. The first retail heatsink to use the tech will launch at CeBIT 2012 and is called the TPC-812.

Other than designing a short form factor cooler, I guess there is one other use for a vapor chamber... that is if amount of heat that needs to be moved from the surface of the CPU to the fins is greater than the capacity of traditional heatpipes to move it.

My observation is that this is not the gating factor. In fact if you see where the technical prowess competition is occurring it is in removing the heat from the heat pipes into the fins and then into the air.

If heat transfer from the CPU surface to the heatsink were the real source of the problem we would see other high-end manufacturers, of much greater prowess than Coolermaster using vapor chambers. It isn't fancy technology... it is just a heat pipe of a different shape.

One con to a single massive vapor chamber I can imagine is that if it goes bad... you have real problems. If instead one of your 6 heatpipes goes bad.... it is unlikely to be a catastrophic event.

I believe that only real advantage to watercooling that overcomes the disadvantage of the extra noise of the pump, the extra complexity and the extra cost... is that it can move larger quantities of heat to the air. No matter what... all heat sinks do is to transfer heat to the ambient temperature air.... from both the CPU and the video card.

But they overcome the gating factor by moving more ambient temp air through larger fin arrays. It doesn't seem to me that anyone has any problems removing the heat from the surface of the CPU. The real problems appear to be how you move that heat into the ambient air.

Though I must admit this is all conjecture. But it seems to make sense to me.

this is what guru3d says


Cooler Master TPC 812 vapour chamber CPU cooler
By Hilbert Hagedoorn, January 14, 2012 - 11:07 PM N/A



I wouldn't be surprised if it is exaggeration, but what if future thermalright and thermaltake etc., start using combo of vapor+heatpipe.

re: the problem you identify, I know this would be insanely expensive, though probably not more expensive than a water cooling kit, but why not have flattened heat pipes as the fins to cool off?

in otherwords, instead of heatpipe + fins, why not just heatpipes like a tree with smaller heatpipes branching off as the branches. a cooler that is entirely made of heatpipes

I think that would be pretty effective... every time you have a hand off of the heat from one medium to another you face potential problems.

BUT... my guess would that to implement such a design would be incredibly expensive. There are probably more cost effective alternatives that provide more cooling at a lower cost.

you mean like water cooling

I was thinking a vapor chamber base with heat pipes as branches, with thinned ends as leaves. I agree it would be expensive. Water cooling though is very high-maintenance.