Gadgetory

sapphire was the first major PC component manufacturer to mass-produce a vapor chamber cooled graphics card when they released the 3870 atomic edition back in 2008 they claimed vapor chambers would deliver significant improvements in cooling performance versus traditional designs that used solid metal or heat pipes but what the heck is a vapor chamber do we go into one it 20 past the 16th hour of each day or am I just completely off-base here all right sorry with the bad joke thankfully behind us let's kick off the helpful part of this video with how a heat pipe works because it's actually pretty darn similar to a vapor chamber a heat pipe is a vacuum sealed metal tube hey I said the bad joke is behind us do it right a vacuum sealed metal tube that contains a working fluid that changes from liquid to gas when heat is applied at one end of the tube this heated gas moves quickly to the other end where it condenses or turns back into liquid then travels via a wick material usually sintered metal back to the end with the heat source this design allows heat pipes to transfer heat much more efficiently than a solid piece of metal and they have the added advantage of being much lighter on top of that modern heat pipe designs perform really well in any orientation even upside down that's why most high performance CPU or graphics card coolers use heat pipe technology in some way these days but heat pipes do have some limitations they only transfer heat in one direction not even acknowledging that one and they're thin round shape means that they are physically difficult to get close to a very small heat source there are a couple of solutions such as embedding them in a solid chunk of metal to spread the heat out to the connected pipes but then we're relying on the relatively inefficient heat transfer of copper we can get heat directly to the heat pipes by flattening them out and putting them right up against something but now due to the sheer size of our heat pipes again and the size our heat source we can only connect a handful of heat pipes if only we had something that could be used in high heat flux applications like on a CPU that could spread that thermal energy out incredibly so we could use traditional thins or even heat pipes to spread the heat even further that would enable efficient operation of larger heat sinks than before and oh snap the topic of this video I'm talking of course about vapor chambers a vapor chamber much like a heat pipe is made of a vacuum sealed flat metal structure that contains a working fluid that changes from liquid to gas when heat is applied anywhere on its surface this heated gas moves quickly throughout the inside of the vapor chamber where it finds somewhere cooler than its boiling point and condenses then travels via Wichman back to the heat source a couple of subtle differences there the most important of which is a vapor chambers phenomenal ability to spread heat out in any direction up to 700 watts per centimeter squared can be spread out they use a series of internal posts to keep them from collapsing remember there's a vacuum inside and they're manufactured for everything from mundane stuff like cooling down a PC all the way to specialized designs that can be as huge as they want or as thin as point five millimeters according to Wikipedia although the thinnest I could find was 1.5 millimeters from cell co technologies and they can be deployed in like outer space sounds awesome right why not use them on everything well I mean they are super cool okay that one was my fault but they're also really expensive compared to heat pipes so you'll only really find them on premium products like high-end graphics cards or check out this seamless sponsor transition kids this is how it's done or on the Coolermaster v8 GTS CPU heatsink which uses a combination of dual 140 millimeter cooling fans aluminum fins copper heat pipes and a horizontal vapor chamber to achieve its impressive 250 watts of cooling capacity and all of that while being almost as sexy as yours truly which may not be a point in its favor now I mentioned that it uses horizontal heat pipes which implies that there may be vertical heat pipes and in fact there are for some more reading on horizontal versus vertical heat pipes check out the link to the appropriate article on CM University in the video description it gives a great explanation of the different ways vapor chambers can be used for CPU cooling thanks Coolermaster for sponsoring this episode of as possible thanks to the audience for putting up with the actual surprising density of bad jokes in this video like this video if you liked it and please do share it if you enjoyed it dislike it if you disliked it so we can improve for next time leave a comment if you have any great ideas for future episodes as fast as possible and as always don't forget to subscribe