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 at 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
via a wick material usually centered 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 Direction not even
acknowledging that one and their 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 efficiently so we could use traditional fins 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 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 a wick material back to the heat Source a
couple of subtle differences there the most important of which is a vapor
chamber's phenomenal ability to spread Heat out in any direction up to 700
watts per ctim 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 .5
millimet according to Wikipedia although the thinnest I could find was 1.5 millim
from celsia 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 highend
graphics cards or check out this seamless sponsor transition kids this is
how it's done or on The Cooler Master V8
GTS CPU heat sink which uses a combination of dual 140 mm 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 Cooler Master for sponsoring this episode as
fast 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
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