Coolermaster CH5-5K12 Heatpipe Heatsink
With out a doubt this has to be the coolest and
most deadly looking piece of cooling hardware to ever grace a computers'
processor! In fact it's one of the only commercially available
socketed heatsinks to employ dual heat pipes in the design, amidst a flurry of
copper no less...
But can all this high-tech cooling gear
and high-conductivity material add up to one devilishly frosty heatsink? To find out
we put the CH5-5K12 through a few rounds on our FrostyTech Synthetic
Temperature Test platform. We'll look at those results in just a second after we see
what makes this heatsink tick!
- For: Intel PIII and AMD
- Dimensions: 54x61x50 mm
- (2) "U" shaped
- (24) 0.25mm aluminum fins
- 3mm thick copper base
- 50x50x10mm fan, 35db, 11.4 cfm
- Fan 12V, 0.15A Ball Bearing
- Patent Pending design
- Cost: about
all this heatsink uses heatpipes. Heatpipes are pretty much what they sound like. In
this case a copper tube of about 1/4" diameter is lined with a coating of
sintered metal power. The tubes contain a small amount of working fluid which
is used in the cooling process. Since the heatpipe tube is hermetically
sealed any increases in temperature easily cause the working
fluid to boil and change from a liquid state into a vapor.
The working fluid will move to cooler regions in the heatpipe since a
pressure gradient is created by the change in temperatures. The fluid then
condenses releasing its stored heat which is then transferred to the surrounding
environment via the heatsink. The condensed fluid returns to the heat
source via capillary action and the process begins all over again.
All this condensing and movement effectively moves heat away
and towards the cooler end of the heatpipes. The process involves no
electricity, and while the heatpipes cannot actually cool anything off (they
just move heat from one location to another) by themselves, they can make the
cooling process easier and more effective.
How? Well for instance just about every single laptop computer on the market comes with
heatpipes installed. The heatpipes move the heat generated by the Pentium III
processors a few millimeters to one side where a larger finned heatsink and
fan can physically be placed. In some configurations the heatpipes actually move
the heat from the processor and transfer it a larger metal plate which may
be part of the notebooks' metal frame. This effectively turns the entire computer
chassis into a giant heatsink of sorts. Notebooks using processors like
Transmeta's Crusoe don't need this extra equipment, but any Intel chip would
pretty much burn up without it.