Of heatpipes and VGA cooling

Fanless heatsink for my VGA card.
The card now looks like the radiator taken from a car engine!


There is an emotional story behind this picture and how something looking like a part of an old fridge came to reside in my PC case. Last weekend the fan-heatsink on my VGA card stopped working. Due to this the display card would shut down (to prevent the super-hot chip from melting ;). After many painful minutes (and much head scratching) I managed to figure out the reason.
I thus had to get me a new fan-heatsink for my VGA card. At the shop I saw a fanless heatsink (about £4 more than the one with the fan) and just had to buy it. With help of a friend I managed to install it properly.

The copper pipes you see are heatpipes. They conduct heat away from the heatsink on the chip. The large outer plates provide increased area for the heat to be convected/radiated off. The large plates are required to provide the same cooling as a normal small fan-heatsink combo.

Heat pipe technology is amazing. Find out more at: http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml