hey everyone. it's great to see a whole community of others who take silent computing as seriously as i do!

anyway, while researching cpu coolers for my next silent build, i realized it would be beneficial to have the heatsink fins further apart from each other, especially at low fan speeds.

I was thinking: what if you were to bend the fins on the megahalems a bit, so that the space between each fin was larger. ie, so they resembled the fanned out pages of an open book, rather than sitting parallel.

has anyone tried this? i'd be very interested in seeing a comparison of "stock fins vs spread fins".

cheers

anyone?

I don't see how spreading the fins is going to work on a stacked design. Only the topmost couple of fins could be bent upward, but the only thing that that would accomplish is better passive radiation. I think it would obstruct airflow. Zalman has had different type of heatsinks with spread fins in semicircles and I actually have one (CPS9500). They're not the most silent and best performing heatsinks around. I think that the tower heatsinks are the prevalent type of heatsink now simply because they perform best.
There are choices between more and less tightly spaced fins and it's a tradeoff between airflow impedance and surface area. The more tightly spaced fins have more cooling capacity as long as sufficient airflow is provided, but this has to be forced a bit as they provide too much impedance for passive operation (they don't allow enough airflow from case fans through to cool effectively). The opposite is true for more widely spaced fins.

awhile ago i saw a mod that bent up all the fins on the leading edge, and down all the fins on the trailing edge...and then installed ducts on the sides that prevented air from not going through the specified path.....

that was the only mod i had seen that increased a tower cooler's cooling capacity.

your idea is stupid. tower cooler performance is actually a rather competitive field, and the megahalems is right at the top. you're not gonna be able to improve it with ANY half-assed diy attempts.

On my 95w tdp core i5 2500k overclocked to 4.8ghz, real temp shows 24c with the prolimatech megahalems without any mods at idle. How is that not cool enough?

While Fayd is being a bit overly blunt. I think he is right. Designing these heat sinks is somewhat of a black art. And a DIY attempt to improved one of these highly engineered heatsinks is likely to end a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" result.

are you autistic or something? just a friendly bit of advice.. if you keep speaking to people like that, you'll eventually get punched in the face.

anyway, i was interested to see if anyone knew of any simple heatsink mods that could be done. the idea of increasing the space between each fin by as little as 30% or so COULD improve airflow without dramatically changing anything design-wise.

if nobody's got proven results from modding a heatsink, it's obviously far more practical to just use things as they were intended. i don't plan on breaking a $60 piece of hardware out of curiosity.

How would bending the fins increase the spacing?

It increases the spacing between fin1 and fin2, but decreases the spacing between fin2 and fin3. So you bend them all, up to finx, the top-most fin. By then all fin spaces should be the same as before, except the space between fin1 and fin2.

It's like lowering the backrest of your airplane seat. It gives you more space, but takes away from the person behind you. So they lower their backrest. In the end, only the first row of seats actually gains something.

Or do you mean bending at the sides? Where you would increase spacing on one side but decrease on the other side?

tim851 - yeah you got the idea first up, except imagine it like this (which is exaggerated):

my predictions are that this mod would increase passive cooling ability, but would also probably alter the airflow from a fan in a detrimental way..

here's a diagram so there's no confusion..

Why don't you try. It seems like you should get equal cooling with less airflow. But you never really know until you try it.

Ah, I see. The Megahalems is split in the middle, I didn't think of that. That could indeed help passive cooling.

You will now be imposed with what we call an "Initiative Penalty": you showed initiative, now you have to work it out.

We'll be expecting both pics and elaborate temperature readings for this project. I'd say by friday, young man!

If you test it and it works, you should hurry up and file a patent (I would shoot for US, EU, Japanese, Taiwan, and Chinese patents). This may look like I am joking, but I am serious.

It is split but the fins are bounded to each other, that contact also giving better firmness. And each "tower" is not symetrically disposed, the exterior part is much smaller.
With classic mounting (fan blowing toward rear in a tower case) air cannot rise in the lower "tower" of this cooler because in the interior part the fins are closed. It's possible that in fanless mode the performance could be a bit better if that air could rise. But MH wasn't meant for fanless cooling.
In this regard, I was thinking about Noctua NH-U12P. It has the fins closed, to channel the airflow toward rear and maybe to not let the warm air from video card to enter through the fins.
If you bent the fins, the airflow would change it's "directional" form, it would spread and that won't give better results.
Maybe there would be a very small improvement of the noise caused by the airflow going through the fins.

Nah, what he proposes basically looks like the Zalman heatsinks of old.

That is a well taken point... but all that does is limit the scope of the patent to tower format coolers - with or without a gap in the middle such as the Prolimitech has.

Also he can't patent it because this discussion exists. Patent law is "stupid" and "autistic". i can make that joke because I'm stupid.

I think this idea is great because it *should* improve the coolers passive cooling properties without having much (any?) effect on it's active cooling.

I personally wouldn't feel very comfortable modding a heatsink that expensive.

Jurisdictions vary, I believe in the US he has 12 months to file.

Yes. But that is how progress is made. Westward Ho.

I am under the impression that, at least in the US, you can not discuss the idea publicly and get the patent.

That is probably wise and prudent, but not always necessary, see:
http://www.mewburn.com/downloads/Patent ... ention.pdf

thanks for the input people. sorry to let you all down but i don't own a megahalems, i can't afford one right now, and as i feared - it seems the fins are stuck together at the outer edges.

what an awesome day job it would be though, to spend 40+ hours a week designing and testing new heatsinks.

i suppose it wouldn't hurt if we suggested ideas like this to the various companies in the hope that they are taken on board. i'm not worried about patenting this sort of minor modification.