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"The Heat Pipes are coming"... The Heat Pipes are

What is a Heat Pipe? and why you should care. A Heat Pipe( hp from hear on out)is a heat transfer mechanism that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer heat between two solid interfaces. And why should you in Audio-land care. In short the Heat Pipes (hp) transfers heat from audio equipment and audio listening rooms to make them both sound better. That's a bold statement for sure. But before you boil over and get ready to blast my post, remember there is Heat Pipe (hp) in the very computer or Laptop you are on right now. It's keeping everything in your computer cool inside so it can work as efficiently as possible. A hp contains no mechanical moving parts, and typically require no maintenance. The hp's are PASSIVE devices that are place on top of equipment and placed in your listening room. In short my dedicated listening room with sound reinforcement, diffusers, dedicated lines, and all kinds of isolation devices for my equipment. I Have never addressed the heat coming from my equipment. Since I have all solid state gear, I never thought it was necessary. But when I started putting the hp's on top of my amps near the transformer. There was a noticeable improvement. Then I did the same with my preamp near the power supply the same improvement. Then I put one on all 4 of my players, SACD,DVD-AUDIO,CD, CD 5-DISC players I was sold. The cherry on top was when I put the extra hp's around my listening room. IMPORTANT: I did not have to remove one piece of sound reinforcement when I introduce the hp's in the environment. They just make what's there work better. They look like Aluminum heat sinks with two copper tube coming out of them. I do have one that has 4 copper tubes in it, and looks to be all copper heat sinks included. I even have some that do not have any copper tubes at all , just all aluminium. The ones with the copper tube are better than the all aluminum ones everywhere I compared them at, which was everywhere. So let that Heat Pipe (hp) in your computer go to work and give me your feed back if you think like me that the "Heat Pipes are coming"... "The Heat Pipes are coming".
jejaudio
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almarg
9,670 posts
 
Jejaudio, thanks for the clarifications of what you have been referring to.

The Vortex 752 is an ordinary and now obsolete CPU heatsink that was made by Coolermaster, a leading manufacturer of that kind of thing. Here is a link. It sold for about $25 (including fan!) a few years ago, and utilized two heat pipes. It is not mechanically compatible with the sockets that are utilized by current generation CPU's.

Not that it has any relevance to the subject of the thread, but for anyone who may be curious the Thermalright model I linked to earlier uses 6 heat pipes, is compatible with all recent Intel CPU sockets, and sells for about $65 plus the cost of a separate fan. It is too large to fit into some computer cases. It is what I am using in the computer I am typing on now.

Regards,
-- Al
jejaudio OP
110 posts
 
Hi, Almarg. The Heat Pipes I have are not the Vortex 752. It is the closest to the ones I have. Mine looks like the Vortex except it is one whole piece like the one you are showing. It also has a copper base plate. The two copper tubes are coming out the same way as the Heat Pipes I have. The Vortex, if it was one solid piece with a copper base plate and no split in the middle, it would be a perfect match.
audiofeil
4,011 posts
 
This is right up kaitt's alley.

Fits his product mix perfectly.
paulsax
275 posts
 
On the surface I can understand the enthusiasm of the poster. HP's are pretty neat and you can, again on the surface, see some advantages. No moving parts, no interference, no maintenance, silent, other things as well. Digging deeper and doing some thinking I would propose to the poster that a couple issues exist. First we are really talking about 3 systems here. First there is some component we wish to cool. That basically (thinking CPU model here) conducts to your heat pipe. Within the HP we get transfer driven by the phase change (with some temp delta and gravity to help out). Now though we need to get the heat away from the HP to keep the party going. This is why your laptop nearly always has a fan blowing across the hot side fins attached to the HP. I'm not going to mess with the math as I'm not really that interested, but as I recall the size v. power issues relegate HP's (the pure passive kind, no fans) to fairly low power stuff. In grad school we spent a term only on cooling on electronic systems and I cant recall finding much that the passive HP can handle by itself. Mind I did not look hard but.....? Other question is how this sort of thing affects sound and man I have no intention of even sticking my head in there, I'm still trying to find the audio equivalent of the bathroom.
inpepinnovations
134 posts
 
AlMarg, to answer your question as to what the final difference in temperature at the device we wish to cool, would be by using the HP in addition to the original cooling devices, I would hazard to say that there would be NO difference since the main driving force (delta temperature) hasn't changed. The temperature at the 'rejection' end of this heat removal system hasn't changed, therefore there is no increased temperature difference, hence no more heat transfer than before.
Of course, if the cooling system was only marginal and the device to be cooled increases in temperature then the addition of further cooling capacity (which is after all, all that the heat pipes are)might be needed.

Salut, Bob P.

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