Maximizing a heatpipe's effectivness, insulation?

[Killer Munkey]

for some odd reason last night i began to think up ways to cool down my 9700pro that has the zalman heatpipe on it. i have one fan blowing from the side of the case at it and now i added a 92mm fan blowing from inside of the case at it and out the back. doing this though made me remeber something oxide, a member on the tbreak forums, said to me when i got the zalman.

i believe oxide said that the heatpipe needs to run hot in order to effectively move the heat. so thinking of that, keeping the heatpipe insulated from air flow so that the only contact the heatpipe has with anything thermally conducting in the slightest bit would be the heatplates.

thats my idea and thinking for the moment. if its true that heatpipes need to run hot to move heat better than insulating it might allow for 5-10mhz more on the core than i'd otherwise get without it.


what do you guys think ? :scratch:

[Freddy]

Hello,

it is true that the hotter heatpipes get on one end, the more effective they are, but the same goes for your CPU heatsink and that does not mean you should make them as hot as possible! ;)
In this case the heatpipes are meant to move the heat from the hottest heatsink on top of the video processor (VPU) to the colder heatsink on the other side of the card to effectively increase the area of the heatsinks. So the best way to get rid of the heat is to cool both heatsinks with a fan (or two). Cooling the heatpipes themselves has in this case little effect, so insulating them probably will not make that much of a difference, but it is best not to cool them directly.

Freddy

[RotorHead]

Here is a cool page I found a while back. It has some good info on building heat pipes.

Very interesting.

http://www.benchtest.com/heat_pipe1.html

[Snafu]

Very excellent site. Wish I had the tools to try this out.
Based on this I am surpised that companies have not developed a sink with pipes that run somehwhat vertically. Most are running horizontal or even upside down when the mobo is vertical. Although they seem to cool well they cannot be very efficient as compared to heat pipes running vertical.