Lay your Ninja PC down?

[hyperq]

Here is a thought: Laying a Ninja equipped motherboard parallel to the ground may make this heat sink more effective.

Heat pipes have liquid inside, which turns into gas when get hot. The gas goes to the top thus takes the heat away. When it is cooled, it turns back into liquid and flows down to the base. So Ninja should work most effectively when the motherboard is parallel to the ground.

Almost all PCs using Ninja I have seen on SPCR are tower cases. The motherboards are vertical to the ground and the heat pipes on Ninja are positioned horizontally. I think the heat pipes will be more effective if they are placed vertically.

[dukla2000]

What we've found at Neoseeker during our reviews is that whether a heatpipe based cooler is standing upright, or standing on its side, the cooling performance difference is less than 1 degree Celsius - so in our real world testing that sort of orientation difference does not seem be a huge factor. Temperature differences resulting from orientation were slight and are likely the result of variations in the test environment.

[mathias]

More importantly, in a desktop type case you pretty much don't have to worry about cantelever force, so you might not want to use a tiny little ninja. But you won't be able to lay hard drives on the case floor, and your optical drives will be rotated 90 degrees. A kit for converting 4 vertical 5inch bays into 3 horizontal ones could be made to remedy this, maybe there is one already? The lack of torque also applies to northbridges, which one person here took advantage of with a zalman 6000CU (bush type heatsink) on the northbridge.

So you could stick that ninja on the nortbridge. As for the CPU, if you want a better passive heatsink than a ninja, you'd probably have to modify a very heavy tightly finned heatsink and spread the fins appart. Or weld a ninja on top of another sink, like a silverstone nitrogen, or something with the fins split down the centre and the heatpipes bent appart.

[Elixer]

Almost all heatpipes in heatsinks have wicks to move the liquid around. This makes the heatpipes just as effective no matter what orientation, because the liquid doesn't pool like it would without the wicks. So no, it won't make any measurable difference.

[hyperq]

I found the following text on heatsink-guide.com.

"However, there have been PC coolers where it seems that the usage of a heat pipe was more of a marketing argument than a technical necessity. Heat pipes used in PC CPU coolers are usually inexpensive units with low capillary action. Considering this, the usage of a heat pipe on the CPU cooler, especially when installed in a tower case (vertical orientation of the heat pipe), is rather questionable."

Click the link below to see the original web page.
http://www.heatsink-guide.com/heatpipes.shtml

[BrianE]

I found the following text on heatsink-guide.com.

"However, there have been PC coolers where it seems that the usage of a heat pipe was more of a marketing argument than a technical necessity. Heat pipes used in PC CPU coolers are usually inexpensive units with low capillary action. Considering this, the usage of a heat pipe on the CPU cooler, especially when installed in a tower case (vertical orientation of the heat pipe), is rather questionable."

Click the link below to see the original web page.
http://www.heatsink-guide.com/heatpipes.shtml

On that same page they link to http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml (which I also ran across) and they mention that certain heat pipes will actually work in anti-gravity situations. It seems like it depends on the quality and design of the heat pipes, with sintered powder ones being the most effective working against gravity.

For testing purposes I recently ran a VM-101 on an X800 Pro for a few minutes with the heatsink installed upside down and noticed when I turned the computer off that the heatsink fins were almost as warm as the base. Just for kicks I may want to try this again under load some day in the future....