What is a Vapor Chamber as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2014-05-07
·
905 words · ~4 min read
0:00
Sapphire was the first major PC component manufacturer to mass produce a
0:05
vapor chamber cooled graphics card when they released the 3870 Atomic Edition
0:10
back in 2008 they claimed Vapor Chambers
0:13
would deliver significant improvements in cooling performance versus
0:17
traditional designs that used solid metal or heat pipes but what the heck is
0:22
a vapor chamber do we go into one at 20 past the 16th hour of each day or am I
0:27
just completely off base here all right sorry with the bad joke thankfully
0:31
behind us let's kick off the helpful part of this video with how a heat pipe
0:34
works because it's actually pretty darn similar to a vapor chamber a heat pipe
0:39
is a vacuum sealed metal tube hey I said
0:43
the bad joke is behind us do it right a vacuum sealed metal tube that contains a
0:48
working fluid that changes from liquid to gas when heat is applied at one end
0:52
of the tube this heated gas moves quickly to the other end where it
0:57
condenses or turns back into liquid then
1:00
via a wick material usually centered metal back to the end with the heat
1:03
Source this design allows heat pipes to transfer heat much more efficiently than
1:08
a solid piece of metal and they have the added advantage of being much lighter on
1:13
top of that modern heat pipe designs perform really well in any orientation
1:17
even upside down that's why most high performance CPU or graphics card coolers
1:22
use heat pipe technology in some way these days but heat pipes do have some
1:26
limitations they only transfer heat in One Direction Direction not even
1:31
acknowledging that one and their thin
1:34
round shape means that they are physically difficult to get close to a
1:38
very small heat Source there are a couple of solutions such as embedding
1:42
them in a solid chunk of metal to spread the heat out to the connected pipes but
1:46
then we're relying on the relatively inefficient heat transfer of copper we
1:50
can get heat directly to the heat pipes by flattening them out and putting them
1:54
right up against something but now due to the sheer size of our heat pipes
1:59
again and the size our heat Source we can only connect a handful of heat pipes
2:03
if only we had something that could be used in high heat flux applications like
2:08
on a CPU that could spread that thermal
2:11
energy out incredibly efficiently so we could use traditional fins or even heat
2:16
pipes to spread the heat even further that would enable efficient operation of
2:20
larger heat sinks than before and oh snap the topic of this video I'm talking
2:25
of course About Vapor Chambers a vapor chamber much like a heat pipe is is made
2:30
of a vacuum sealed flat metal structure
2:33
that contains a working fluid that changes from liquid to gas when heat is
2:37
applied anywhere on its surface this heated gas moves quickly throughout the
2:41
inside of the vapor chamber where it finds somewhere cooler than its boiling
2:45
point and condenses then travels via a wick material back to the heat Source a
2:50
couple of subtle differences there the most important of which is a vapor
2:54
chamber's phenomenal ability to spread Heat out in any direction up to 700
3:00
watts per ctim squared can be spread out they use a series of internal posts to
3:05
keep them from collapsing remember there's a vacuum inside and they're
3:08
manufactured for everything from mundane stuff like cooling down a PC all the way
3:13
to specialized designs that can be as huge as they want or as thin as .5
3:18
millimet according to Wikipedia although the thinnest I could find was 1.5 millim
3:21
from celsia Technologies and they can be deployed in like outer space sounds
3:25
awesome right why not use them on everything well I mean they are super
3:29
cool okay that one was my fault but they're also really expensive compared
3:33
to heat pipes so you'll only really find them on premium products like highend
3:38
graphics cards or check out this seamless sponsor transition kids this is
3:43
how it's done or on The Cooler Master V8
3:46
GTS CPU heat sink which uses a combination of dual 140 mm cooling fans
3:52
aluminum fins copper heat pipes and a horizontal Vapor chamber to achieve its
3:56
impressive 250 watts of cooling capacity
3:59
and all of that while being almost as sexy as yours truly which may not be a
4:04
point in its favor now I mentioned that it uses horizontal heat pipes which
4:08
implies that there may be vertical heat pipes and in fact there are for some
4:12
more reading on horizontal versus vertical heat pipes check out the link
4:16
to the appropriate article on CM University in the video description it
4:19
gives a great explanation of the different ways Vapor Chambers can be
4:23
used for CPU cooling thanks Cooler Master for sponsoring this episode as
4:26
fast as possible thanks to the audience for putting up with the actual
4:30
surprising density of bad jokes in this video like this video if you liked it
4:34
and please do share it if you enjoyed it dislike it if you disliked it so we can
4:38
improve for next time leave a comment if you have any great ideas for future
4:42
episodes as fast as possible and as always don't forget to subscribe